After two years in Gaza, freed hostage recalls starvation and desperation

Segev Kalfon said he had planned an escape but his fellow captives talked him out of it.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Freed hostage Segev Kalfon told Yedioth Ahronoth that the worst thing he had to bear in his 738 days of Hamas captivity was not physical or mental torture, but the constant starvation.

“It’s a hunger that you can’t get used to. It feels like the body is eating itself from the inside,” he said. “You get used to the bombings, the fear, the danger – but not to the hunger.”

He described how food was used as a cruel game.

“In the water we were supposed to drink, there were these kinds of small fish. I would filter them with a gauze pad,” he said.

“They would give us some rice, full of worms, and what would you do – separate the rice from the worms? So you just close your eyes and eat. What else would you do? We would say, ‘It’s protein.’”

“Sometimes it was a few black seeds that we had to divide among ourselves,” he recalled. “Sometimes there was a big pot that you look at and say, ‘Wow,’ and then open it and discover a thin layer of something – some leftovers of theirs – at the bottom.”

Saying that he felt like the “living dead” while existing “in an underground grave,” at one point Kalfon became so desperate that he tried planning an escape.

“I thought to myself, what’s preferable, to undergo what I’m undergoing? The torture, the suffering, the hunger, this danger to life – and who knows if at the end I’ll even remain alive? Maybe I could have a 50% chance that I could be saved and live,” he said.

“I actually had an escape route planned out in my head, I sketched out what I was going to do and how – but the friends who were with me stopped me,” he said.

Kalfon was first held in various apartments with Yosef Chaim Ohana and Maxim Herkin before a nearby IDF bombing led their captors to move them into a tunnel for 11 months, together with Ohad Ben Ami, Elkanah Bohbot and Bar Kuperstein.

When asked what he thought could help him heal after such a terrible ordeal, the 27-year-old answered that talking about his horrific experiences is healing, as is his Jewish faith, “which has strengthened” since being captured at the Nova dance festival during the Hamas invasion of Oct. 7, 2023, during which the terrorists massacred nearly 1,200 men, women and children and overall took 251 hostages.

In previous interviews, Kalfon talked of how he eventually came to terms with his fear of dying, whether from IDF bombings or at the hands of his captors who beat him often.

“Death becomes your best friend. You talk to death all the time” while in the pitch-black Hamas tunnels, he said.