What HAMAS Did To Israel’s Hostages
The recovery of the body of Master Sergeant Ran Gvili on 26 January, the final Israeli hostage held by HAMAS, brings the war in Gaza to an end in all important senses. Whether the Israeli war aims as set out in policy terms by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can be obtained remains to be seen, but they are less important than the cause, in both senses, of the war: the 7 October 2023 pogrom. That atrocity laid upon Israel several existential obligations: to demonstrate that any such attack comes with a devastating price, that the identifiable perpetrators will die, and to uphold the bond of Jewish peoplehood that commands nobody is left behind. These have now been accomplished. The rest is details.
The political warfare waged against Israel in its various forms over the past twenty-eight months was, at its core, an attempt to deflect attention from the Simchat Torah pogrom—from its immediate victims, those Israelis raped and slaughtered on that awful Saturday, and its ongoing victims, those Israelis kidnapped and taken to Gaza by HAMAS. This campaign was not without success, despite the heroic efforts of the hostages and their families to counter it. At the present time—as many “pro-Palestinian” activists move on other advocacy, notably for the Islamic Revolution in its war against the Iranian population, and the antisemitic craze, or “mass psychosis” as it is more properly called, that they sustained begins to subside—there is perhaps some space to restore balance to the record before a false history of this period is encoded.
About one-third of the 251 Israeli hostages were murdered by HAMAS, some on 7 October and some in captivity. The most high-profile case in Israel is the Bibas family, abducted from kibbutz Nir Oz during the pogrom. Shiri Bibas and her two children, eight-and-a-half-month-old Kfir and four-year-old Ariel, were murdered by HAMAS no later than November 2023. The terrorists slaughtered the babies with “their bare hands” and mutilated the corpses to try to cover up what they had done. In August 2024, HAMAS massacred six hostages—Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov, Carmel Gat, and Almog Sarusi—without any attempt to disguise what they had done.
The living hostages were routinely tortured by HAMAS throughout the entire ordeal. The starvation and psychological torment were symbolised by Evyatar David, a young man kidnapped from the Nova music festival, who was seen in a video last year, emaciated in a HAMAS tunnel under Gaza, being made to dig his own grave. HAMAS was unashamed of this behaviour: the terrorists themselves released the video, partly to try to manipulate Israeli politics, and partly simply to gratify their own supporters who like to see Jews suffer. David was thankfully released on 13 October 2025, which was meant to be the day when all the hostages, living and dead, were freed. That Israel had to mount a complex operation to recover Gvili nearly four months later gives an indication of how well this “peace” agreement will work.
There was some attempt by HAMAS to obscure how systematically it deprived the Israeli hostages of food by dangerously force-feeding some of them just before release. Such was the case with Segev Kalfon, a Dimona native kidnapped at Nova. Having been starved for two years, Kalfon was given more food in the days before he returned to Israel in October. Kalfon’s experience in general was representative. Amid unrelenting pressure to convert to Islam, Kaflon was subjected to regular beatings, interspersed with random assaults—such as on the way to and from bathroom breaks—and episodes like being stripped to his underwear and having a Stanley knife held to his throat for no particular reason. All of this intensified Kaflon’s Jewish faith and identity, as it did for David and many other hostages.
Where Kaflon’s experience differed slightly was in initially being held above-ground. Kalfon and two other hostages were being held together in an apartment close enough to see the commotion when Israel rescued four hostages from Nuseirat in June 2024. He was taken down into the tunnels after that. In January 2025—during a ceasefire, it should be noted—HAMAS gathered the group of six hostages Kalfon was now with, and told them to pick three to be murdered and three to be shot in the legs. It was just one form of psychological torture. Lesser forms included the terrorists eating large bags of cookies in front of the hostages, whose starvation was claimed to be a reprisal for the imaginary “famine” in Gaza. Even at the last, HAMAS had one more mind game, telling Kalfon he alone would be not be released.
Another thing that never let up was the cramped conditions. Yosef Ohana, bartending at Nova when the HAMAS Einsatzgruppen arrived, was put in a pit in one of the tunnels, along with six other men, days before he was released last October. The pit was so small that the seven men “could not sit, could barely stand and lean against the wall. There was such a lack of oxygen there that they could have died from that alone.” Avinatan Or, an attendee at Nova, was held in isolation, handcuffed inside a cage roughly six feet high and six feet wide, for the last year before he was released in October. By that time, Or had lost more than one-third of his bodyweight.
Nimrod Cohen, the sole survivor of the tank crew ambushed at the “White House” outpost on 7 October, was savagely assaulted and nearly lynched by a mob of Gazan civilians during his abduction. In captivity, Cohen was treated with special cruelty because he was a soldier. Cohen was not only kept in a cage on his own for eighteen months before he was released in October, he was blindfolded for most of that time and regularly beaten during “interrogations”. No medical care was given for the ear infection and skin rash Cohen developed six months and more before he was freed.
The denial of medical treatment—for injuries HAMAS inflicted or maladies acquired because of the squalid conditions HAMAS kept the hostages in—was constant. A terrible case was Maya Regev, abducted from the Nova festival and released during the first ceasefire in November 2023. She had been shot by the terrorists during the pogrom. The “treatment” administered by the HAMAS doctor consisted of pouring vinegar in the wound to “purposely cause pain” and on one occasion holding Regev at gunpoint while he needlessly cut into the wound with a small knife. Multiple corrective surgeries were needed to repair the damage.
The massive use of sexual violence by HAMAS and the other units of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), notably Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), that invaded Israel on 7 October is just about the only element of the atrocities that day the “pro-Palestine” movement has felt any embarrassment about, if for slightly different ideological reasons among the Islamists and Leftists. The response has been a vast disinformation campaign to deny that it happened, abetted by the difficulties HAMAS et al. created in collecting physical evidence by murdering most of the victims, then mutilating and burning their bodies. However, the reality was plain enough even in the days after 7 October, from the surviving eyewitnesses, among other things, and since then some victims have been able to speak for themselves, as have those who suffered in this way in captivity.
In early 2024, Amit Soussana, a lawyer abducted from Kfar Aza on 7 October and released on 30 November 2023, disclosed that, having been repeatedly sexually assaulted by a HAMAS operative from almost the moment she was taken, she was raped at gunpoint around 24 October. Romi Gonen, kidnapped at the Nova festival, was held for 471 days, until January 2025. Gonen was wounded during the kidnapping and first sexually attacked within days by the doctor HAMAS sent to her. Subsequently, Gonen was molested by a HAMAS terrorist who was “ecstatic, as if he had received the gift of a lifetime.” Thinking to herself, “Romi, everyone in Israel thinks you’re dead, and you’re going to be his sex slave for life”, she was then threatened with a gun at her head: “If you tell anyone, I am going to kill you”. Over a sixteen-day period, Gonen was violated repeatedly by two HAMAS captors.
A 15-year-old girl, Dafna Elyakim, taken from her home in Nahal Oz with her family in one of the abductions HAMAS livestreamed, was held by a terrorist “who would touch me all the time, or tell me that I was going to stay there …, and that we were going to have children together, and a house and all that”. “He would always tell me that he was coming with me to shower”, Elyakim added. Thankfully that did not happen, though the permanent threat had obvious effects. Ilana Gritzewsky, abducted by HAMAS from her home in Nir Oz and held at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, was sexually assaulted “on the way to Gaza” and fainted. She still does not know “what had been done to my body in those lost minutes when I wasn’t conscious”. When she awoke, “I had to beg not to be raped, telling them I was on my period”, says Gritzewsky. She had lost 26 pound from the lack of food by the time she was released in November 2023.
While women and female children were particularly targeted for sexual attack and torture on 7 October, it had been known since late 2023 that there were male victims of the Palestinian IRGC units, and one of the first victims to speak, albeit anonymously, was a man. This, too, continued once Israelis were in captivity.
Sasha Troufanov, an Amazon electronics engineer, was abducted along with his fiancé, mother, and grandmother while visiting his childhood home in Nir Oz on 7 October 2023. His father was murdered that day. Troufanov was released in February 2025. Stabbed, shot in both legs, and his head split open with a rifle butt during his kidnapping, once in Gaza Troufanov was attacked by a civilian mob and thought they were going to kill him. Which they probably would have if the terrorists did not stop them. “Troufanov received almost no medical treatment … [H]is broken leg was wrapped first with a wooden broom and then with part of a metal grill.” On only two of the 498 days Troufanov was held did he see another hostage.
Troufanov, held by PIJ, was kept in the tunnels for most of his captivity. The conditions were damp and he was given minimal food; the silence was total for months at a time and it was “so dark he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face”. Initially, though, Troufanov had been kept above ground “for more than six weeks locked in a cage and given barely enough food to survive”. It was in this early phase that Troufanov was sexually harassed: “one guard repeatedly tried to encourage him to do a sexual act on himself” and he found a “hidden camera filmed him when he was allowed a shower once a week. ‘I noticed it and I took the shower trying to avoid my private parts towards this angle, but I had to do it because I needed to shower’.”
The talented musician Alon Ohel, abducted at the Nova festival and held by HAMAS, reported a similar experience to Troufanov. Wounded seriously in his face and body with grenade shrapnel during the abduction, Ohel was taken to a HAMAS base in one of the hospitals. Ohel was attacked by ecstatic Palestinian civilians as he was dragged in, and “the staff stitched up his eye in a superficial way, leaving the shrapnel in place”. Taken down into the tunnels at the end of November 2023, Ohel remained there until October 2025. “You don’t get used to hunger”, Ohel says. “There’s pain over the whole body, all the time. You look like a skeleton. … And they’re happy. They’re smiling. It makes them feel good.” Ohel says of the sexual assault on him: “In the shower, one terrorist came in. He put shampoo on my body, touched me. I tried to pull away. I told him, ‘I can do it myself.’ He said it was ‘important’ so I wouldn’t get a rash. Luckily for me, it didn’t continue.”
A security guard at Nova on 7 October, Rom Braslavski was released with the last living hostages. Braslavski was beaten once in captivity, then tied to a wardrobe in a house in Gaza and neglected to the point that Palestinian civilians were able to discover him unguarded and tried to murder him. The terrorist captor returned in time to disperse the mob, but Braslavski, severely wounded, was then retied and left again. Unlike most hostages, Braslavski spent little time in the tunnels at all: he was held alone, above-ground, and moved around Gaza for almost his entire captivity.
After refusing to convert to Islam around March 2025, Braslavski was given even less food, denied bathroom breaks, blindfolded, and had stones forced painfully into his ears with nails to block his hearing. The beatings became more frequent. One night, with his hands and feet ziptied, Braslavski was punched in the face until he was nearly unconscious, then lashed with a whip, on his back and the soles of his feet. After a few hours sleep, he was woken up and beaten the same way. The cycle went on. Sometimes the radio brought in to play music as the terrorists laughed and danced while hitting Braslavski would be used as a weapon.
The filthy conditions HAMAS kept the Israeli hostages in were designed to demoralise and humiliate. The PIJ operatives holding Braslavski went further. Braslavski, who is only 21, gave an interview last November where he said: “They stripped me of all my clothes, my underwear, everything. They tied me up from the …” After trailing off, Braslavski went on: “When I was completely naked. I was wiped out, dying without food. And I prayed to God—save me, get me out of this already … It is sexual violence and its main purpose was to humiliate me. The goal was to crush my dignity and that’s exactly what he did.”
Guy Gilboa-Dalal was kidnapped from the Nova festival with his friend, Evyatar David; two of their friends were murdered that day. He was released in October 2025. Gilboa-Dalal’s ordeal up to January 2025 was depressingly familiar: brutalised during the abduction, beaten again by a cheering civilian mob after he arrived in Gaza, and then subjected to a routine of starvation, insanitary and cramped conditions, and physical and psychological torture, the permanent intimidation and fear, banned from even speaking to his fellow captives.
It was during the January 2025 ceasefire, when HAMAS was feeling emboldened, that a new form of torment was introduced:
[A HAMAS commander referred to as] Amon led [Gilboa-Dalal] blindfolded to the captors’ room, saying that HAMAS had information about an Israeli spy who resembled him. The spy, he claimed, had a tattoo on his leg. Amon removed Mr. Gilboa-Dalal’s pants, ostensibly to check. There was no tattoo. Then Amon went onto his computer, complaining that he had not seen a woman in a long time … “He asked if I wanted to watch a porn movie,” [Gilboa-Dalal] said. Amon moved closer. “He came up behind me and began touching me, kissing the back of my neck, putting a hand on my chest,” Mr. Gilboa-Dalal said. “I froze.”
“I said to him: ‘You’re joking, right? This is forbidden in Islam’. He pressed a rifle to my head and a knife to my throat. He told me that if I told this to anyone, he would kill me.”
“A few days later”, Gilboa-Dalal went on:
Amon took the hostages to bathe one by one. When it was Mr. Gilboa-Dalal’s turn, his captor prevented him from dressing and dragged him back to his room. There, Mr. Gilboa-Dalal said, Amon threw him onto a mattress on the floor and began rubbing his penis against his anus for what seemed like 15 to 20 minutes.
“I froze again,” he said. “Should I resist? I didn’t manage to make a sound.”
Mr. Gilboa-Dalal tormented himself with thoughts of whether he was somehow to blame or could have done something to prevent it. “How many times will it happen? How will it end?” he recalled asking himself. “I had nowhere to go. I was in their hands.”
Aware that [the other hostages he was with, Tal] Shoham and [Omer] Wenkert[,] were set to be released during the cease-fire, he decided to confide in Mr. Shoham … [and ask him] to tell his parents what had happened to him if he did not get out alive. He was worried that he might be killed if he resisted a more violent sexual assault.
Mr. Shoham confirmed Mr. Gilboa-Dalal’s account … Mr. Gilboa-Dalal told him about [the sexual attacks] in detail by using a wet wipe to write on a grimy plastic plate, in case their captors were listening. After being released in February, Mr. Shoham said he discreetly told senior Israeli officials about the abuse[.]
Mercifully, that was the last of that. Once Israel resumed military operations in March 2025, “Amon” was no longer left alone with the hostages. In every other respect, the treatment of the captives markedly declined, though. “They starved us in the extreme”, says Gilboa-Dalal, who was off-camera when David appeared in that obscene video in August 2025, as emaciated as his friend, unable to move even his arms without great pain because of the muscle wastage. Gilboa-Dalal responded to the demands to accept Islam by pretending to be interested; some rapport might decrease the chances the terrorists would murder him. All the time, Gilboa-Dalal was deepening his attachment to the Jewish creed and peoplehood.
NB: I aimed to give an overview here. The other Israeli hostages who were among the last of the living released in October 2025—Ariel Cunio and David Cunio, and Gali Berman and Ziv Berman, pairs of brothers HAMAS would not even allow to stay together in their captivity, Bar Kupershtein, Eitan Avraham Mor, Eitan Horn, Elkana Bohbot, Maksym Harkin, Matan Angrest, Matan Zangauker (partner of Gritzewsky), and Omri Miran—have individual stories to tell. They should all be heard, as should the hostages released at other times, the survivors of 7 October, and the relatives of the slain.
Thank you for summarizing their stories. I have followed some of their accounts but it is always a different thing to see it all in the same place