Ditza Or: Avinatan once almost escaped his Hamas captors

He had his head out of the tunnel when they dragged him back and punished him severely, his mother said.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The mother of freed hostage Avinatan Or revealed that her son once came close to escaping from his Hamas captors, she told Israel Hayom in an interview published Wednesday.

“It was a year and a few months ago, when there was fighting in the area,” Ditza Or recalled. “There was a bombing, parts of the tunnel started to collapse, and chaos broke out – so he took advantage of the fact that people were crowded together and had started running, and he tried to escape.”

“He was already halfway out, his head was already outside the tunnel,” Or said, “and then they grabbed his legs.”

Avinatan was severely punished for his escape attempt.

He was beaten and confined to a cell barely the width of a mattress and shorter than his height — 197 centimeters. He could not straighten his body, either standing or lying down. He was also kept constantly handcuffed, chained to the bars of the cage, his mother said.

Avinatan told this story to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when the premier visited the hospital to meet several of the freed hostages, Ditza noted.

Netanyahu, she said, was relieved that her son had not succeeded in escaping.

“[The prime minister] told him, ‘It’s good that you didn’t make it, because reaching the IDF forces under such conditions would have been very difficult.'”

Some two months into the war, three Israelis who had escaped their captors, Yotam Haim, Samar Talalka and Alon Lulu Shamriz, were accidentally shot and killed when they tried approaching IDF soldiers in the middle of an active battle zone, despite stripping their shirts off to show they were unarmed, waving a white shirt and yelling out in Hebrew that they were hostages.

When asked if she agreed with Netanyahu’s assessment, Or answered, “Avinatan is the kind of person who, no matter where he is, takes control of himself, takes positive action. I think that it was good that he tried, for his own spirits and strength.”

Avinatan, 32, was one of several men who spent the whole two-year period of their captivity entirely alone.

“He didn’t hear a single word of Hebrew the entire time,” Or said. “He already thinks in Arabic and then translates [what he wants to say] into Hebrew. Arabic words constantly slip out.”

His mother called this remarkable, “because there was an order forbidding anyone from speaking to him at all, so only the very lowest ranks uttered a few words to him on occasion.”

Avinatan Orhamas hostageHamas tunnelIsrael-Hamas war