Six hostages recall faith, brotherhood in captivity

Former captives describe the strength Jewish acts of faith gave them amid terror and deprivation.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Six hostages who endured Hamas captivity in the tunnels together spoke for the first time in a joint interview aired Friday on Channel 12, revealing the incredible bond they forged and especially how acts of Jewish faith gave them strength.

Yosef Chaim Ohana, Segev Kalfon and Maxim Harkin were transferred underground to join Bar Kuperstein, Elkana Bohbot and Ohad Ben Ami after being held in nine different above-ground locations.

Hamas moved them following Operation Arnon on June 8, 2024, when IDF forces rescued four hostages from apartments in the Nuseirat refugee camp.

Despite their fear of the tunnels, the three said they felt safer underground from Israeli airstrikes and were grateful to find the others there, who reassured them they would adjust to the lack of air, constant hunger and physical confinement.

Ohana said the moment they bonded into one group came two days later, when their three “hosts” invited them to join their regular Friday night ceremony.

With toilet paper serving as makeshift kippahs, they stood together and “suddenly we were yelling out the Sabbath songs,” he said. “Screaming out the songs from home – it was an unbelievable moment. The place shook. That’s when we said, ‘It’s good we came down here.’”

“It was the most emotional thing I ever heard,” said Kuperstein.

They had many discussions around Divine Providence, Ben Ami said, who said that although he was a secular kibbutznik, he told the others he believed God was looking out for them, because each one had survived the Oct. 7 Hamas-led invasion when so many others didn’t.

“Maybe there is a God in heaven who wants us to live,” he recalled telling them. “We’ll survive this. He’s protecting us.”

“I felt I had to say ‘thank you’ for the food, drink, for lots of things, and I didn’t know how,” he added. “They taught me,” he said, pointing to the others.

They agreed immediately when asked if faith played a large role in their lives in the tunnels.

“I got to the point,” Kalfon said, “that I sewed kippahs for everyone out of Ohad’s jalabiya,” after Ben Ami was released in the second hostage deal in February 2025 and left it behind.

“Everything that linked us to our roots, to Judaism, strengthened us the most,” he added.

“Whether it was welcoming the Sabbath, the holidays, saying Shir Ha’maalot (Psalms) or Selichot (pre-Rosh Hashana prayers) … it’s strength that’s impossible to describe in words.”

Ben Ami was their unquestionably their father figure, the others agreed, being a husband and father in his 50s while they were all single and in their twenties.

He rejected the description of being their “leader,” but Ohana said that when a captor threatened to amputate one hostage’s finger for a propaganda video, after a long silence, Ben Ami said, “Take mine.”

The threat was ultimately abandoned, but that moment “stopped the joke, or whatever it was, because he sacrificed his finger,” Ohana said, pointing to Ben Ami, and the group fell silent.

For his part, Ben Ami said, “I was blessed to be with them, really. They looked out for me… If we needed to dig, they’d say, ‘You don’t dig.’ When the food came, they tried to give me first.”

When Ben Ami was the only one freed from the group in February, he said the first thing he told his daughters was, “You have five new brothers, and we have to fight for them” to be released as well.

They also recounted severe physical and psychological abuse, including beatings and extreme hunger, with the tiny portions that barely sustained three being split among all of them when they became six.

On the 450th day of captivity, the men said a new man came and told them to choose which three would be shot in the head and which would be shot in the knee, in retaliation for the killing of Hamas operatives.

They refused, and for seven hours, they were terrorized as their captors pretended to decide for them, and then changed their minds.

In the end, they were spared — but the man warned that the next “mistake” by Israel would mean immediate execution, and he would reappear sometimes, causing the group to fear greatly for their lives.

Their bond is unbreakable, the men affirmed in the interview.

“We were given our lives back as a gift,” Ben Ami said. “Our second lives will be better — and we’ll always strengthen each other and be there for each other.”