Ex-hostage recounts years of Hamas physical, psychological torture

Yosef Chaim Ohana describes beatings, threats and narrow escapes in Channel 12 interview.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Two weeks after being released by his Hamas captors with the other 19 live Israeli hostages as part of the first stage of the Trump cease-fire and peace plan, Yosef Chaim Ohana described the physical and psychological torture he underwent for two years in an interview with Channel 12.

He escaped death many times, he said.

At the very beginning of his captivity, “an angry man came into the room, cocked his pistol and put it to my head,” Ohana recalled. “’Tell me how many people you have killed; now I’m going to kill you.’ I replied, ‘Zero, zero. I haven’t killed anyone.’ Then he said, “Oh, you’re also lying to me,’ and he was about to shoot me. At that point, a sheikh walked in, caught his hand and motioned to him, ‘Not now.’”

That was “one of the spontaneous moments,” he noted. “There were other, planned times, when they really wanted to make us fearful…. They would sit us down and say, ‘Your government has done such and such, now we will take revenge.’”

“They told us to choose among us, who should be killed and who would just be wounded. They would have us draw lots,” the 25-year-old said matter-of-factly.

Later on in captivity, when death seemed imminent, he said he appealed to their logic.

“I already knew them, what was important to them, why they kidnapped me … that I was an important bargaining chip. I told them, Why are you doing this? You’re doing this because this is what God expects of you. And to come in vengeance – they have a law not to take revenge – you’ll [do it] … to make your citizens happy, but what about the prisoners waiting to be released from prison and see their families? You know that if I die, they’ll release fewer prisoners.”

When asked how he told this to his captors in Arabic, Ohana paused, began to say a few words, and then stopped with a grimace, saying that it was too hard to speak Arabic because it reminded him of his captivity.

“I want to speak Hebrew,” he said.

Ohana also described how his small group sat in dark tunnels and at first looked forward to seeing lights approaching because that might mean they were to get food or drink.

But after they were beaten several times, for example, andg made to stand against a wall with their shirts off as fists rained down on them, the appearance of flashlights would cause panic attacks, he said.

He described the captives’ thought processes: “What should I do? Should I stand or sit? Who’ll be the first to get it? Everyone wants to run farther into the room but then says, ‘No, that won’t look good, we have to spread out all over the room.’”

Even though this may mean not receiving food, they preferred that their captors wouldn’t come “for a week, two weeks, a month, and just leave us alone.”

Six days after Ohana came home, his father, Avi, described on the Moreshet radio channel how his son and the other six men he was with were not even given a reprieve after the cease-fire deal was announced.

“Yosef told me they were taken down a staircase, deeper and deeper, into a pit so small that seven men could not sit. They could barely stand, and the lack of oxygen alone could have killed them,” he said, calling their survival under such torture for two years “miraculous.”