Ex-hostage says she lived in ‘Holocaust-like conditions’

Arbel Yehud attested before the Knesset’s Law, Justice and Constitution Committee to being beaten, starved and psychologically abused by her captors.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Arbel Yehud, who was released during Israel’s second hostage deal with Hamas in January, testified before a Knesset Committee Monday to the “Holocaust-like” conditions she suffered as a prisoner in the Gaza Strip and demanded that the government stop the war to gain the freedom of the remaining captives.

Yehud had come to be a voice for the remaining 58 hostages because, she charged, the government was not doing all it could to bring them home, concerned as it was “with the [political] survival” of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

She criticized the new military offensive in Gaza that “endangers the hostages daily,” she said, describing how she had felt the “whistling of the missiles, the hundreds of shells and their blasts” on her body when the IDF offensive reached Rafah, where she was being held.

In general, Yehud was treated horrifically during her 482 days of imprisonment, but it became worse when those related to her Gazan captors were injured by IDF actions, she noted.

Then, she said, “I would be badly beaten and sent to solitary confinement for long days with no food fit for human consumption and with a hygiene level comparable to concentration camps in the Holocaust.”

She was held close to where captives Luis Har and Fernando Marman were rescued by IDF forces in February 2024 and knew what had happened, she added.

At that point, she said, she told her family “goodbye” because “I felt it was going to be my last day.”

Yehud was taken by Hamas invaders on October 7, 2023, from Kibbutz Nir Oz together with her partner, Ariel Cunio, and his brother, David. They were given over to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group in Gaza. The two men are still held in captivity.

“I only survived because I kept the hope and duty of returning to my family,” the 29-year-old told the MKs, “especially to the children of my brother Dolev, after finding out that he had died.”

This commitment kept her going for every minute of her 482 days as hostage “and even during moments of despair,” she noted with a trembling voice, “when I was being humiliated and suffered psychological abuse and their attempts to break me.”

Only negotiations and not military action can save the hostages, she said, because “the terrorists don’t value their own lives or the lives of the civilians in Gaza, whose deaths in war truly don’t deter them.”

It is the Israeli legislators’ duty to prevent more Jewish blood from being spilled, she said, including that of the IDF troops now in Gaza in an expanded offensive.

“Look at me,” she demanded of the ministers and MKs in the room. “See who you abandoned and who you have chosen to sacrifice as a solution to the Gaza problem…. Your hands will be covered in their blood and the blood of the soldiers if you do not stop this war.”

“As parents and grandparents I ask that you see the hostages as your children and grandchildren and bring them back to the family of the Jewish nation,” she said.

She concluded with a call for all Israelis to “go out to the streets and stop life in the country until the return of all the hostages” because without that step, she said, the freed hostages could not be rehabilitated and “we will not return to being nation we once were in a country we came back to after 2,000 years of exile.”