Dozens of hostages, including three French people, were released during the truce between Hamas and Israel. The first testimonies on the conditions in which they were held are beginning to be revealed.
With the release of the hostages, the veil is gradually lifted on their conditions of detention in Hamas bases. More than 60 hostages – 43 Israelis and 26 foreigners or dual nationals, including three with French nationality – and 12 Thai workers were freed in the first four days of the temporary humanitarian truce between Hamas and Israel, with more expected to follow. But still more than 150 hostages are being held for the Palestinian Islamist group and awaiting release without having any guarantees.
The released hostages begin to open up about their more than 40 or 50 days of detention. The Israeli army is careful not to leak any information, but some testimonies from relatives have reached the media. They all report a “hell” and the “horrors” experienced by the hostages. “It’s unimaginable,” said the aunt of one of the three Franco-Israeli teenagers released on November 27 after having found daily life in the hands of Hamas.
Of the dozens of released hostages, few showed serious physical injuries. The hostages “were not tortured or mistreated” according to Meirav Raviv, relative of three hostages released by Hamas – her cousin, her nephew and her grandmother – to Ynet. But other testimonies report scenes of beatings by the local population when the hostages arrived in Gaza, such as that of Deborah Cohen, the aunt of the Franco-Israeli Eitan released on November 27, on BFMTV. “Apparently Eitan was not treated well” according to the boy’s aunt and mother adds RTL. Of all the released hostages, only one was hospitalized in intensive care upon arrival in Israel “due to a serious lack of care during her detention” according to the director of Soroka Hospital in Beersheba, in the south of Israel.
Uncertainty therefore still hovers over the physical violence suffered by the hostages during captivity, but all suffered from the conditions of detention. Several relatives of hostages indicated that they found their family members thinner, some having lost 7 kilos as indicated by Meirav Raviv. “There were days when they had no food,” she assures. And when there were meals, they were meager mainly made up of bread or rice, cheese and cucumbers according to Yocheved Lifshitz, an Israeli octogenarian released on October 23, before the agreement between Israel and Hamas. Very irregular meals and also limited access to hygiene: “We had to wait an hour and a half to two hours from the moment we asked to go to the toilet until they authorized it”, according to the testimony of Meirav Raviv. However, octogenarian Yocheved Lifshitz explained after his release that the conditions of captivity showed a certain preparation since the jailers had provided “shampoo and conditioner.”
However, there is no doubt about the psychological violence suffered by the hostages during their captivity. French teenager Eitan “experienced horrors” according to those close to him and was “forced to watch the film” of the October 7 attack, his mother said. The hostages were also threatened during their detention according to the same testimony: “Every time a child cried, they threatened him with a weapon.” Meirav Raviv also spoke of threats from jailers against the hostages and their families, according to her, certain members of Hamas accompanied their threats with gestures mimicking a slitting of the throat.
“The children really lived through hell. They suffered mental torture, very, very hard experiences” indicated the families of the two other freed French children, siblings Erez and Sahar Kalderon, to Parisien. Concerning the state of health of the children, the Minister of Foreign Affairs still wanted to be reassuring and indicated that the ex-hostages “do not seem to be experiencing psychological shock beyond what this terrible detention may have caused. , For the moment everything is well”. The coordinator who takes care of the hostage families confirmed to BFMTV that the children’s condition “is stable”. But it is a long “difficult rehabilitation process” that awaits the three teenagers.
The hostages captured during the October 7 attack would not be grouped in the same place according to information from the Israeli army and in recent days specialists have reported in the Israeli media that the hostages could be distributed and held by different formations such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other rebel groups. The hostages would therefore be scattered across the north of the Gaza Strip and would not all be held in the same conditions. But all appear to be held underground, and perhaps in tunnels used by Hamas according to Israeli army intelligence. Yocheved Lifshitz explicitly said she found herself in a tunnel stretched like a “spider’s web” underground and a relative of another freed hostage told the Times of Israel that the latter had “had to adapt to the light of the sun” and “walked with her eyes down because she was in a tunnel”. Testimonies shared by other relatives of released hostages.
