2023-11-27 14:41:43
After seven weeks of captivity, nearly forty Hamas hostages returned to Israel. Although information surrounding their captivity was closely monitored, some details began to emerge, particularly in the Israeli press. Families thus gave some information on the conditions in which some of their loved ones lived during these long weeks of waiting and anguish.
Merav Raviv, whose cousin Keren Munder, 9-year-old son Ohad, and mother Ruth were released by Hamas, said food was sometimes lacking. “They were not tortured or mistreated, but some days they had nothing to eat and sometimes they had to wait between an hour and a half and two hours between when they asked to go to the toilet and when they were asked to go to the toilet. allowed them,” she said. from the Israeli news site Ynet. Her cousin and aunt each lost about 7 kilos, she added. His family members also allegedly slept not on beds, but on rows of chairs close together in a room, reports the Times of Israel.
Only one meal during the day
Furthermore, Merav Raviv also explained that the guards who detained his family were armed and had their faces uncovered and not hooded. His relatives would have suffered constant threats. “It was scary, they kept doing that to them,” she described to the Israeli press, her thumb on her neck to mime slitting her throat. Released before the truce for humanitarian reasons, Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, also recounted the “hell” of her captivity.
She said she was beaten several times before being held in tunnels stretching under Gaza, “like a spider’s web.” She described her jailers as “courteous” and having provided everything – “even shampoo”. They “made sure we were clean, that we ate. We ate the same thing as them,” she described, namely pita bread, cheese and cucumbers: “It was the only meal of the day. »
“She was no longer used to daylight”
Other hostages appear to have experienced the same conditions of detention underground. Eyal Nouri, the nephew of Adina Moshe, 72, who was released on Friday, said his aunt had “had to adapt to the sunlight” because she had been in the dark for weeks. “She walked with her eyes down because she was in a tunnel. She was no longer used to daylight. And during her captivity, she was disconnected from the entire outside world. »
Another testimony, that of Yair Rotem, whose 12-year-old niece was released on Sunday. When she returned, her family said they had to remind her that she didn’t need to whisper. Those inmates “always told her to whisper and be quiet, so I keep telling her now that she can raise her voice,” her uncle said.
Although most of the freed hostages were able to walk and speak normally, doctors warned of the terrible psychological after-effects that these weeks of captivity could cause. At the same time, an 84-year-old Israeli hostage, released on Sunday, was hospitalized in intensive care. “She is being treated in our emergency department, due to a serious lack of care during her detention in recent weeks at the hands of Hamas,” Shlomi Codish, director of Soroka Hospital in Beersheba, told reporters in southern Israel.
Other hostages should be released this Monday, according to the agreement reached between Israel and Hamas.
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