2023-12-02 18:27:54
Both children and adults were forced to be in absolute silence.
In the dark. Forced to remain silent. Fed with scant rations. These and other even more chilling data begin to show how the hostages kidnapped by Hamas survived.
Around 240 people, from babies to octogenarians, were taken hostage during the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7.
Dozens have been freed, but many more remain missing, allegedly in the hands of the Palestinian militant organization and other Gaza groups, as the warring sides resume battle.
Neither the Red Cross nor other humanitarian groups are allowed to visit the hostages.
Therefore, relatives and the rest of the world have to wait for the testimonies of those who have been released to know what may be happening to their loved ones who are still held in Gaza: If they have been seen, if they are alive or dead. .
The details below have been compiled from comments from released hostages to their families, caregivers and, occasionally, journalists.
Under the terms of the agreement between Israel and Hamas, the majority of those released are women, children and foreign workers.
As of Friday, only one adult Israeli man, who also had Russian citizenship, and no members of the Israeli army had been released. The hostages are believed to be spread across different locations and in the hands of different groups.
It already appears that not all hostages were treated in the same way; The story of each newly recovered person will contribute to the understanding of their conditions.
In the dark amidst “incessant bombardment”
Adina Moshe was taken from her safe room in Israel, taken to Gaza and forced into five-story underground tunnels, according to her nephew Eyal Nouri.
“They took her inside the tunnels… she walked barefoot through the mud of the tunnels,” she told CNN about the first hours of her captivity. “It was very difficult to breathe. They walked [durante] hours through the tunnels,” he added.
Moshe said his aunt was held in an underground room where the lights were on for only two hours a day. The darkness was literal and also figurative, Nouri said. Deprived of all information, their other senses and imagination became sharper.
“They didn’t know anything about what was happening upstairs,” explains Nouri. “They only heard the non-stop bombings until the day before their liberation. Suddenly there was an amazing silence and they knew something was going to happen, but they didn’t know what.”
The network of tunnels under the built enclave of Gaza described by Adina Moshe coincided with the testimony of Yocheved Lifshitz, an 85-year-old grandmother released early in the conflict, outside the terms of the truce.
For weeks, Thomas Hand assumed his daughter was also underground. “It’s more than likely that she is in a tunnel somewhere under Gaza,” Hand told CNN, after learning that Emily, pronounced dead on her day, was believed to be a hostage.
“November 17 is his birthday. She will be 9 years old,” she said. “He won’t even know what day it is. He won’t know it’s her birthday. There will be no birthday cake. No party, no friends. She will be petrified in a tunnel under Gaza. “That’s his birthday.”
Hand was shocked upon her release when Emily told her that she, her friend Hila Rotem-Shosani, and Hila’s mother, Raaya Rotem, were imprisoned on the surface in a series of houses.
That carried its own dangers. As Israeli forces attacked Gaza, pushing deeper into Palestinian territory, Rotem and the girls were forced to run from building to building.
“It’s frightening. Getting pulled, dragged, pushed… probably under gunfire,” Hand said. An estimated 40% to 50% of buildings in northern Gaza have been damaged, according to independent researchers, and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said Wednesday that up to 1.8 million people are believed to be in Gaza, or almost 80% of the population, are internally displaced.
Hand was right when he said that Emily had lost track of time. Released on the 50th day of captivity inside what she called “the box,” the girl told her father that she thought she had been out of it for a year.
Forced to endure in silence
“The most shocking and disturbing thing about finding her was that she was only whispering, you couldn’t hear her. I had to put her ear to her lips,” Hand said of Emily. “They had conditioned her not to make noise.”
Both Emily and Hila only dared to whisper, even once back with their families. Three days later, Hand said he could hear Emily from three feet away when she spoke, but when she cried she buried herself under the bedclothes and was almost silent.
He had learned Arabic to say “quiet!” Hand said. The hostage children were only allowed to draw or play cards quietly.
Eitan Yahalomi, 12, was also ordered to remain silent, even while being made to “watch movies that no one would want to see” of the October 7 attacks, his aunt Deborah Cohen told CNN affiliate Bfmtv.
Omer Lubaton Granot, founder of the Hostage and Missing Relatives Forums, stated that they pointed a gun at Eitan’s head to threaten him if he cried.
“What we heard from the children’s stories, the harsh reality of captivity, is incredible,” Granot said.
“Other children’s sisters told them that Hamas told the children that their entire family is dead, that no one wants them back, that they have no home to go to. They tried to scare the children,” she added.
Fed with survival rations
The captives ate the same as the guards, according to Lifshitz, who was freed along with her neighbor on October 24.
Grandmother Ruth Munder told Israel’s Channel 13 that conditions worsened as the captivity lengthened and the Israeli siege on Gaza tightened.
UN officials have warned of “massive outbreaks of infectious diseases and hunger” in the enclave due to Israel’s strict blockade on all imports apart from a small amount of humanitarian aid.
At first, a guard brought chicken, rice, preserves and cheese for the hostages. “When we got up we drank tea and in the afternoon again tea and sweets for the children,” Munder said, “until the economic situation began to be bad and people went hungry.”
Adina Moshe said in her room in the tunnel: “They were only fed rice and some canned beans, which they tried to avoid eating so as not to have stomach pain,” her nephew reported.
Emily Hand told her father that they always had breakfast and sometimes had lunch or dinner.
He said he was so hungry that he learned to like regular bread with olive oil. Since she was released she wants to eat “like a horse,” her father said, but for now they are restricting her intake while she recovers from her shrunken stomach.
The story is similar for other former captives, whose weight loss and pale skin surprised relatives who welcomed them home.
Former Thai captive Uthai Saengnuan said his concern was for his compatriots still in captivity.
Physical and mental injuries
Eitan, the 12-year-old boy, was beaten when he arrived in Gaza, his aunt also said. “Maybe I was naive, but I thought they would treat him well. But no, they are monsters,” she said, referring to her Hamas captors.
Emily Hand claimed she was not hit and her father said he believed the harsh voices were enough to make her do what they wanted.
When her friend Hila talks about her captivity, it’s as if she’s describing a scene from a movie she saw, not something she went through herself, her uncle Yair Rotem told CNN.
“Now she’s a little distant, she’s a little cold,” he said. “He talks about the things that happened as if they were in the third person, as if they had happened to someone else. She will say that she saw horrible things, but she says it with a straight face.”
The father of a Thai hostage who spoke to his son after his release said he appeared to be in good health and good spirits. “He suffered insect bites during his captivity,” Chumpron Jirachart, Manee Jirachart’s father, told CNN.
Thomas Hand said Emily also suffered insect bites. “She has a head full of lice, absolutely full of lice. She had never seen so many in my life.”
He said he and his oldest daughter worked in tandem with combs. “One pass and the thing was full, full of little black creatures.”
Elma Avraham, 84, was seriously ill when she returned from Gaza, first needing a ventilator as she fought to survive in hospital.
Dr. Hagai Levine, head of the medical team at the Hostage and Missing Relatives Forums, said her body told its own harrowing story.
“You can see from her body that she was dragged from one place to another, that she was handcuffed,” he said. “She has chemical injuries from not attending to her basic needs.”
First steps towards recovery
Rehabilitation will take time. According to experts, ex-captives can suffer various psychological effects, such as anxiety, depression, disorientation, grief, post-traumatic stress and survivor’s guilt.
Many hostages lost their homes in the October 7 attacks; As they return, some also discover how many of their friends and family were killed.
But Dr. Efrat Bron-Harlev, CEO of Israel’s Schneider Children’s Medical Center, where some of the hostages have been treated after being released, said what staff had seen so far gave them optimism.
“We have heard from many of the children and women unimaginable stories, some of them truly unreal. We have heard stories that, as doctors and caregivers, we find hard to believe could be real,” Bron-Harlev said.
But his patients were strong and determined.
“In the last five days, we have met children who at first were withdrawn and lost, and after a day or two, they were running around the room, playing and laughing.”
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