Former hostage Tal Shoham – ‘I refused to kneel’

Given barely 300 calories’ worth of food a day and beaten frequently, he said he and his fellow hostages “preserved our humanity between each other.”

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Former hostage Tal Shoham, in an interview aired Saturday on Fox News, told of being starved, physically beaten and psychologically abused for most of his 505 days of imprisonment but refusing to show fear or submission to his Hamas captors.

Shoham and his wife, Adi, and two young daughters, Nave and Yahel, bolted to the safe room of Adi’s parents in Kibbutz Be’eri when Hamas terrorists took over the community during their October 7, 2023, invasion of southern Israel. When the terrorists managed to open the window, Shoham went out to surrender, hoping to keep his family safe.

Shoham was tossed into a car trunk driven the few necessary minutes to enter the Gaza Strip. A crowd of civilians quickly formed who tried to beat him with sticks.

One of the terrorists pointed a rifle at him and wanted him to kneel.

Thinking he was going to die on the spot, Shoham defied him.

“I said, ‘I can’t control whether you kill me or not,’ and I raised my hands — but I refused to kneel. ‘If you want to kill me, kill me, but you will not execute me like ISIS.’”

He was then forced to walk through the streets surrounded by a “mob,” he said, who were screaming at him and trying to hit him, “But I just waved and smiled. I didn’t show fear. ‘You’ve captured me, but you won’t see terror in my eyes.’”

Kept alone and shackled for 34 days in a family home, he was starved from the first day, but what was worse than the hunger, he said, was the isolation and the torture of not knowing if his family was alive.

As a tactic to keep himself sane, he imagined their funerals and buried them in his mind while crying in a way that his captors would not see him.

“That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done — burying my family in my mind,” he noted.

When Adi and the girls were freed in the first hostage deal seven weeks into the war, the terrorists gave him a letter from her, which gave him strength.

“The most important thing had happened — my family was safe,” he said. “I didn’t need to be a father and husband protecting them anymore. Now, I could focus on my war, the one I knew how to fight, the one for survival.”

Two hostages taken from the Nova dance festival, Evyatar David and Guy Gilboa-Dalal, were then brought to the same home, so Shoham was no longer alone. They were beaten “daily,” he said, forced to stay in bed and speak only in whispers, and given almost no food while their captors ate in plain sight.

In June, they were moved via ambulance to a tunnel, where they found another hostage, Omer Wenkert. Their room contained four mattresses on the floor, a hole in the ground that was their toilet, and one dim bulb for light.

“It took me weeks to stop feeling like the walls were closing in, to adapt to the oxygen deprivation,” Shoham said.

Given only a little rice and 300 ml of water each day and being very physically abused, he and David developed serious infections, with Shoham’s leg turning “blue, yellow, and purple with internal bleeding.” Months passed before a doctor was brought to examine them, and all he gave them was a week’s worth of vitamin supplements, but “it dramatically improved our condition.”

The Israelis refused to be degraded by the constant threats and abuse they suffered, Shoham said.

“There was dignity,” he asserted. “The terrorists brought in whatever horrors they wanted, inflicted whatever cruelty and pain they could, imposed their inhumanity on us. But within our space, we preserved our inner cleanliness, our humanity between one another. And that was crucial to making it out unbroken.”

Shoham also noted that the terrorists were seemingly not deterred by the evisceration of their forces by the IDF during the 15 months of warfaire.

The hostages heard their captors constantly digging in order to broaden their underground network even as the IDF was blowing up the most strategic passages among the hundreds of miles of terror tunnels the army found throughout the Strip.

“Hamas never stopped digging tunnels,” Shoham said. “Not for a single day.”