According to recent media reports, Ohad Ben Ami, Or Levy, and Eli Sharabi were severely tortured and abused while in Hamas captivity. One of the hostages related, “We were treated like animals.”
By Rachel Avraham
According to recent media reports, Ohad Ben Ami, Or Levy, and Eli Sharabi were severely tortured and abused while in Hamas captivity. One of the hostages related, “We were treated like animals.” I24 News reported that their Hamas jailors strangled them, tied them, gagged their mouths with cloth to the point of suffocation, and branded them with a burning object during very different interrogation sessions. The Times of Israel reported that at one point, during these interrogation sessions, one of the hostages collapsed, leading fellow captives to think he had died.
According to the report, these three males hostages were held in small rooms within tunnels, where they had difficulty breathing. Channel 12 quoted Or Levy, one of the three civilian men released on Saturday telling his family: “I was bound in a dark tunnel, without air, without light. I couldn’t stand or walk, and only toward the time of the release did the terrorists remove the chains and I learned to walk again.” According to the report, the hostages were held mostly in tunnels, and always in dark, unventilated spaces, and had to “convince their captors” to let them relieve themselves more than once a day.
Haaretz reported that former Hamas leader Sinwar had ordered the male hostages to be starved. For this reason, the male hostages returned in worse condition that the female hostages. I24 news reported that every few days, they were given a rotten piece of bread that they had to share with other hostages held with them and were deprived of food the rest of the time. Haaretz claimed that they barely ate and were not even given a pita every few days, and that they went hungry most of the time. According to the Times of Israel, the captors used to eat in front of the hostages without giving them food, and occasionally forced them to choose which of them would eat.
The Times of Israel reported that the hostages were barefoot the entire time, allowed to shower only once every few months, and were unable to distinguish between day and night. However, they were reportedly able to hold Sabbath services on Fridays. Or Levy’s brother Tal told the Haaretz newspaper that the hostages, who were entirely cut off from media, preserved their sanity by counting the days since their abduction on October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel to massacre some 1,200 people and take 251 hostages, sparking the war in Gaza. However, according to Channel 13, the captors routinely exposed the hostages to Israeli politicians’ statements opposing the hostage deal, telling them that “they don’t want to get you out.”
Tal Levy, the brother of Or who was recently released, told Haaretz how he felt when his brother was released from captivity: “I saw a shadow of him. I saw a Holocaust survivor, someone who had been through a Holocaust. Suddenly, I realized what he had been through, the horror of it. I cried, but not for the future, because I know that now he will be okay. I cried because of what had happened, because of what he had gone through”
He added that there is now a great fear for the lives of the people who remain in Gaza: “They need to know that every day that goes by, the hostages are dying there. If they wait a few more months or weeks, they’ll die, and there’ll be no one to rehabilitate. Or wouldn’t have survived a few more weeks, that’s the reality. It’s a matter of mere week.”
“It wasn’t what the women went through; it was far worse. The men still in captivity won’t survive this,” Levy says. “If Or could speak of what he had experienced, with that look on his face, people wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.”
