Hostage was ‘broken by Hamas,’ says father

Hisham al-Sayed, a hostage held by Hamas for almost a decade, “does not communicate” and is in “a very bad state,” said his father.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Hisham al-Sayed, who was released Saturday after being a prisoner of Hamas for two months short of a decade, was broken by Hamas and is in poor mental condition, his father told Hebrew-language media Saturday.

Al-Sayed, who had reportedly been diagnosed with schizophrenia and a personality disorder in his youth and was institutionalized several times, was not forced to participate in a humiliating release ceremony.

He was simply brought to a Red Cross vehicle in Gaza City, which then drove him over to IDF forces who took him to Ichilov Hospital to be examined and meet his family.

A Hamas official told Al-Jazeera that this was done out of “respect for his family and the Arabs of Israel,” and “because he has Palestinian roots,” but the family rejected the statement out of hand.

“He was in a torture camp,” Al-Sayed’s father Shaaban told Ynet. “They didn’t want people to see what condition he was in, so there was no ceremony.”

“Hamas are liars,” he added. “If they had any respect for people, they would have released him a long time ago…. As a Muslim, I am furious with Hamas.”

Speculating that his son had been isolated while in captivity, Shaaban said he returned “broken and is in a very bad state. He almost doesn’t speak, and if he does, it’s only in a whisper, and he lowers his head.”

In an interview with Channel 12, he excoriated Hamas again.

Hisham “is not well; he was not in our world. A kind of Tarzan after living for 10 years with animals. He does not communicate,” he said.

“He tries to talk and to share, but he doesn’t succeed,” the father added. “He says a lot of incomprehensible things. He speaks in a whisper, maybe out of fear. I believe he is in a state of mental torture.”

In videos released of his family greeting him in the hospital, al-Sayed can be seen with a completely expressionless face, being hugged briefly by one person after another.

Some family members said he should have been freed together with the other hostages.

“There should be no difference between him and the Jewish hostages. It makes us feel like he is better than them, but for us, each of the hostages is important, regardless of faith,” they said.

Jewish Ethiopian-Israeli Avera Mengistu, who also suffered from mental problems and had wandered into Gaza in 2014, was freed in a ceremony in Rafah along with Tal Shoham, a resident of Kibbutz Be’eri whom Hamas had abducted on October 7, 2023, along with 250 others during their invasion of southern Israel.

Hisham had attempted to enter Gaza several times before 2015 during long walks that he took alone.

He often went where he shouldn’t, according to an earlier statement by his father to Human Rights Watch. “He likes the attention when he goes places he knows are forbidden,” Shaaban said, noting that he had also crossed illegally into Jordan twice and that once, he succeeded in entering the Gaza Strip.

“In 2010, he went to Gaza too, and the Bedouins we know there helped return him within 24 hours,” he said. “But the Hamas leadership changed in 2014, and his luck ran out.”