According to a recent report in the Jerusalem Post, Or Levy, Eli Sharabi and Ohad Ben Ami, who many claimed were so frail that they looked like Holocaust survivors, were “weeks away from a cardiac arrest,” a form of heart attack, due to the poor conditions under which they were held by Hamas.
By Rachel Avraham
According to a recent report in the Jerusalem Post, Or Levy, Eli Sharabi and Ohad Ben Ami, who many claimed were so frail that they looked like Holocaust survivors, were “weeks away from a cardiac arrest,” a form of heart attack, due to the poor conditions under which they were held by Hamas. A security source who investigated the plight of the recently released hostages found that “the condition of the soldiers and male hostages is the worst” out of those who are still alive, the Jerusalem Post reported.
The security source stated that “the male hostages are suffering from extreme starvation, and it is doubtful whether they can survive another month or two.” Levy, Sharabi, and Ben Ami had lost 20% of their body weight, according to the source. Families of the hostages right now very much fear for the fate of the young men and the soldiers, who are exposed to sadistic abuse by Hamas.
Male hostages under 50 are viewed by Hamas terrorists as “soldiers of the occupying army,” which explains their harsher treatment, including threats, physical and psychological abuse, and starvation, the Jerusalem Post added. However, when Daniella Gilboa, one of the female IDF lookout hostages, watched the release of three male hostages last week – who came out thin and emaciated – she told her mother: “If I had been released two months ago I would have probably looked like them.” Her mother told the BBC: “She got thinner, she lost a lot of her weight through the captivity. But in the last two months they were given a lot of food to gain weight.”
And Daniella Gilboa is not the only female hostage to report significant weight loss. Romi Gonen, age 24, who was taken hostage at the Nova Music Festival but was released last January, lost 20 percent of her body weight, the BBC reported. In fact, the Jerusalem Post reported that Romi Gonen was forced to undergo a 10-hour surgery in order to repair the physical damage caused by starvation.
The 16 Israeli hostages freed in recent weeks after being held in Gazan tunnels and homes for more than a year have begun to provide accounts to their families of being beaten, chained, burned and violently interrogated, the Washington Post reported. According to the report, former hostages said their captors tormented them by boasting that Israel no longer existed and taunted them about the fate of family members, who in many cases were killed or abducted during the Hamas-led assault on Israel 16 months ago.
The Washington Post reported that early in Yarden Bibas’ captivity, captors told him that his wife and children were alive and in Tel Aviv. He believed him. Then, in January 2024, Hamas gunmen filmed him after telling him his wife and children were killed in an Israeli airstrike. In the video, they force him to demand, in between heaving tears, that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agree to return their bodies to Israel.
Ms Gilboa, the mother of Daniella Gilboa, one of the IDF lookouts, told the BBC that the hardest thing she endured in recent months was seeing a video that suggested her daughter had been killed: “Her captors poured powder on her so she looked like she was covered in plaster, as if she was killed in an Israeli military strike.”
This was not the only shocking testimony to come out of the hostages. According to Commentary Magazine, 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 last 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, the sexual abuse of the captives was widespread. Hamas also apparently tortured a child with an item similar to a hot branding iron. The hostages were also physically abused, according to the captives. Yarden Bibas and Ofer Calderon were beaten and kept in cages, Commentary Magazine reported.
Psychological abuse was also common. 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, Commentary Magazine noted. The IDF female lookouts would be ordered around to clean and cook for their captors, and to care for their children, while barely getting fed themselves. This in itself was a form of psychological abuse.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently proclaimed when asked his thoughts about President Trump’s threat to break all hell loose if all of the hostages are not released by Saturday at noon: “It’s always a tenuous ceasefire, because you’re dealing with a terrorist organization in Hamas — who has kidnapped, murdered, raped, savaged innocents. And so you’re not dealing with a nation-state here who’s operating under the laws of war or any laws for that matter. So it’s very tenuous. We’ll see what happens on Saturday.”
He continued: “I think the President’s been very clear he wants to see those hostages come – be released. He’s tired of this drip, drip every week. There’s some Americans there as well. He wants to see them released, and he’s made very clear that if that’s not the case on Saturday, then then all bets are off. And it’s not going to be good for Hamas. But let’s hope that that resolves itself. I don’t think anyone wants to see a resumption of hostilities. But by the same token, we can’t have Hamas deciding what parts of the deal they’re going to live up to and what parts they’re not.”
