Dr. Esi Sharon-Sagie looked down at her beeping phone. Photographs focusing on the gaping mouth of a gray face had appeared, along with the question: “What do you think?”

“I didn’t have to think,” the dental expert recalled. “I knew. I knew the teeth in those photos as well as I know my own. I knew I was looking at Yahya Sinwar.”

That text from the Israel Police was sent on October 17, the first day of Sukkot last year, and there was, as that point, no DNA analysis of the man who had been confronted and shot by Israel Defense Forces soldiers. But Dr. Sharon-Sagie’s unequivocal identification of Sinwar, the Hamas terror leader, was sufficient for Israel to tell the world that a body found in the rubble of a Gaza building was likely that of the man who had planned and perpetrated the October 7 massacre a year earlier.

Dr. Sharon-Sagie, 50, recognized last summer by Forbes Israel magazine as one of the country’s leading medical practitioners, is an oral and facial reconstruction specialist at the Hadassah Medical Organization. In parallel, she has volunteered for the past 15 years with the Israel National Police Division of Identification and Forensic Science. Today, she heads its dental section—26 of whose 62 members work in Hadassah’s faculty of dental medicine.

“Our core job is identifying victims and hostages, not terrorists,” she said. “But I felt very strongly that, one day, we may need to identify Sinwar. This [past] summer, I discussed this with the police, they agreed, and I began assembling a dental profile.”

She started with information from the Israel Prison Service, which had held Sinwar for the 22 years of the four life sentences that he had served for his abduction and murder of two IDF soldiers. “But it didn’t include dental records,” Dr. Sharon-Sagie recalled. “So I asked a dental specialist in my forensic unit, Ila Grosswald Meiri—like me, she works and teaches at Hadassah—to try and build those records. She did it that same day, fine-toothcombing the records we had and collecting internet pictures of Sinwar.”

Reminded that Sinwar had undergone life-saving brain surgery at Israel’s Soroka Medical Center during his imprisonment, Dr. Sharon-Sagie obtained his 26-year-old medical records, including CT scans of his head, with the help of another Israel Police forensic dental team colleague, Dr. Anna Pikovsky, who is on staff at Soroka. (A nephew of the Israeli prison doctor who saved Sinwar’s life by finding his brain tumor and referring him was among those massacred on October 7.)

While X-rays are usually necessary to show dental morphology in sufficient detail—the size, shape and distinguishing features of each tooth that are unique to each individual—Sinwar’s dentition was unusual. He showed his teeth when he spoke or smiled, which allowed Dr. Sharon-Sagie and her colleagues to pick out several distinguishing features: a gap between his two upper front teeth, one of which was slightly chipped; a lower left molar tilted away from its neighbor; and a lower right front tooth that grew above the level of his bite. As one irreverent online commentator put it, “Sinwar stole billions of dollars, but didn’t spend a penny of it on dental hygiene.”

“His face, dental and jaw structure were all fixed in my mind,” Dr. Sharon-Sagie said. “When the image arrived on my phone, I knew immediately what the soldiers in the field had known. Without hesitation, I confirmed Sinwar’s identity, signing off on it with forensic anthropologist Prof. Tzipi Kahana and Dr. Revital Hivert of Hadassah’s Faculty of Dental Medicine.”

If the doctor felt any sense of justice or gratification at seeing Sinwar dead, it lasted no more than seconds, crowded out by the omnipresent fear for Israel’s hostages and soldiers. “What I knew was that a monster was dead,” she said. “I’d seen for myself what he’d done. I’d worked days and nights to identify the men, women and children whose bodies had been so severely mutilated and burned on October 7 that only their teeth could tell us who they were.”

A forensic dentistry lecture when she was in her 30s had prompted Dr. Sharon-Sagie to train in this grim, emotionally taxing field. Forensic dentists are called when teeth are the only way to identify a body. 

One of Dr. Sharon-Sagie’s first challenges in the field was helping identify 44 people who burned to death in the Mount Carmel Forest fire in December 2010. With her daughters, Yael and Adi, then only 9 and 5 years old respectively, when she started out in forensic dentistry, Dr. Sharon-Sagie chose not to examine the bodies of children. Today, with Yael in dental school, Adi in military intelligence and her third child, Noa, in 7th grade, she has removed that self-imposed restriction.

The atrocities of October 7 and the months that followed have taken her and her colleagues into a different dimension. She and her husband, Tomer, had been about to take a morning run when the Hamas attacks began. The next day, she was called to an identification center hurriedly set up at the IDF’s Shura military base near Ramle in central Israel, which serves as the home of the IDF’s rabbinate and was, until then, one of the country’s quietest military outposts. Tomer drove her there from Jerusalem. They arrived to find trucks streaming in, filled with bodies from Gaza border communities, and anguished families overflowing a vast tent while they waited for news.

Inside, hundreds of body bags lay on trestles—“the sheer number was overwhelming,” she recalled—with volunteers checking that each contained both head and body. Quickly donning protective clothing. Dr. Sharon-Sagie emptied her mind of everything but the work ahead.

That job was nonstop for the next three months, during which she took a temporary leave from her position at HMO.

“Identifying civilians, so mutilated that neither face nor gender is recognizable, can be very challenging,” she said. “Unlike soldiers, for whom the IDF keeps DNA, fingerprint and dental records, those of civilians are with private and public dentists and clinics countrywide. We worked around the clock to give heartbroken families answers, ensuring we made no errors. As of now, we’ve identified 166 people who were murdered either on October 7 or in captivity, whose identities could be confirmed solely through dental records.”

Today, she is back at Hadassah, going to Shura only when called by the IDF or Israel Police for help identifying those killed in the conflict or bodies recovered in Gaza. Dr. Sharon-Sagie’s team keeps complete files for each of the hostages still in captivity—“their smiles, their dental records, their CT scans,” she said.

One great support through this horrific year, she explained, is her team. “I work with wonderful people who give not only their time and their skills, but their very lives to this work,” said Dr. Sharon-Sagie.

Another is HMO. She was born at Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem, earned all her academic degrees there, including her Doctor of Medicine in Dentistry, and it is where she did her postgraduate study in prosthodontics and specialization in maxillo-facial rehabilitation. She now heads the Hadassah Dental Faculty’s postgraduate prosthodontic program.

“Because my team and I are attached to the police, not the army, we weren’t officially reservists when the war began,” she said. “Even though we were at Shura 24/7, we were classed as ‘volunteers’ and not, therefore, entitled to our civilian salaries”—that has since been redressed—“But Hadassah decided that, for them, we were reservists, and kept us on full pay without pressuring us to return to work until we could.”

She is indelibly marked by what she has seen and experienced since October 7. “What sustains me,” Dr. Sharon-Sagie said, “is my family, my colleagues, the support provided by the police, and the privilege of being qualified to do this sacred work.”

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Wendy Elliman is a British-born science writer who has lived in Israel for more than five decades.