By Seth Mandel
Monday, February 10, 2025
Now that Hamas’s abuse of Israeli hostages threatens to
derail the cease-fire, the subject will get more attention. The hostages,
especially those who were freed recently, have been concentrating on recovery.
In the future, we expect to learn in much greater detail what happened to the
captives in those tunnels and dungeons, but what we know already is troubling
enough.
This week the attention is on Or Levy, Ohad Ben Ami, and
Eli Sharabi because their abuse was evident before they even said a word. But
more information has come trickling
out: they were, reportedly, burned with hot objects, hung upside down, kept
in chains, at times gagged to the point of suffocation, starved and dehydrated.
It is not the first shocking testimony from ex-captives.
Amit Soussana was chained up in a child’s bedroom. After
her captor let her bathe, he stripped her of her towel and sexually assaulted
her, Soussana told
the New York Times in March. Later, she was suspended in the space
between two couches and beaten. According to recently released hostages,
Soussana’s captors beat her at gunpoint viciously until another captive
convinced the Hamasniks that they had mistaken her for an IDF officer.
According to other
testimony, sexual assault of the captives was widespread. Hamas also
apparently tortured a child with an item similar to a hot branding iron.
Physical abuse is common, according to the captives.
Yarden Bibas and Ofer Calderon were beaten and kept in cages. Bibas was also
subject to the psychological abuse Hamas takes special pleasure in doling out.
His wife and two young children were also taken hostage. At one point, Bibas’s
captors told him his family had been killed in an Israeli airstrike, and took a
video of his anguish. Hamas has not confirmed the fate of Bibas’s wife and
children, even after his release. They reportedly tormented
Bibas about his family throughout his nearly 500-day captivity.
The hostages would often be told they were being freed
when they weren’t. Gadi Mozes, an 80-year-old farmer released last month, was
at one point kept
in a hot pickup truck for 12 hours underneath a Red Cross building in Gaza.
He hoped he was being processed for release, but it turned out he was just
being moved to a new location.
During the initial Oct. 7 attacks, before taking Emily
Damari captive, Hamas terrorists shot
her dog. While she was comforting the dog as it lay dying, Hamas shot her
in the hand, taking off two of her fingers, then dragged her to Gaza.
Another form of torture practiced by Hamas was to let
serious injuries go untreated and force the captives to watch them deteriorate.
Romi Gonen was taken into Gaza with a bullet wound. She
was permitted to clean the wound with no painkillers and her captors reportedly
laughed at her as she did so. “Her hand is disabled now, she can’t use it,” her
mother told
the Times of Israel. She has a long road of surgery and physical therapy
ahead of her.
Daniella Gilboa was taken into Gaza with a bullet in her
leg and returned sixteen
months later with the bullet still in her leg. Before her release, Hamas had faked
her death to torment her family, releasing images supposedly of Gilboa’s
corpse wrapped in a burial shroud.
Doron Steinbrecher suffered from a condition that
required daily medicine, which she was not given in captivity. She and her
fellow captives received so little food they would count the grains of rice
they would portion out to each person in her hostage group to make sure it was
a fair split.
We are sure to get much more information once the more
recent ex-hostages are ready to talk in detail about their experiences in
Hamas’s dungeons. But the strong possibility exists that the emaciated
survivors released on Saturday were the healthiest captives Hamas had left.
What we already know of the torture and torment amounts to unspeakable crimes,
but they may be just the tip of the iceberg.
No comments:
Post a Comment