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.”

The post Six hostages recall faith, brotherhood in captivity appeared first on World Israel News.

Avinatan Or dug his way out of a tunnel, wrote “hostage” on a sandbag in the hope that IDF forces would find him.

By World Israel News Staff

Freed hostage Avinatan Or recounted a daring escape attempt he launched during his two years of captivity in Gaza — an effort that ended with him being severely beaten after his Hamas captors discovered his plan.

Or, who was kidnapped from the Nova Music Festival alongside his girlfriend, Noa Argamani, was released with 19 other living hostages as part of the Trump-brokered ceasefire agreement finalized in October.

Speaking Sunday evening at the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly in Washington, D.C., Or described the desperate attempt he made to free himself from Hamas captivity.

“I tried to escape. I dug for weeks through sandbags, through a collapsed tunnel toward the surface. I made myself work to change my own destiny,” Or said.

“One day, as I was digging, I hit the root of a tree. I smelled it. It felt like touching life in the place of death,” he said.

“Then, one night, I reached the outside. I saw stars for the first time in years.”

At that point, Or said he wrote the word “hostage” on a sandbag, presumably hoping to attract the attention of IDF forces. But his captors soon discovered what he had been doing.

“They beat me for days. They tied me to a chair for a week,” Or recalled.

Despite spending more than two years underground — starved, tortured, and isolated — Or said he credited a few things with keeping him alive.

“My engineering background saved me. I counted steps, collected data, built a small lamp from broken cables, planned escape routes in my head and told myself ‘you won’t let others decide your fate,’” he said.

Or added that he had heard radio broadcasts shortly before being moved into the tunnels, during the brief period he was held above ground shortly after his kidnapping.

“I heard… about all the love and support from the Jewish communities in America and around the world,” Or said.

“You prayed for me and for all the other hostages to return home safely as soon as possible. You gave me hope and strength.”

The post Freed hostage recounts tunnel escape attempt, brutal beating appeared first on World Israel News.

Segev Kalfon said he had planned an escape but his fellow captives talked him out of it.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Freed hostage Segev Kalfon told Yedioth Ahronoth that the worst thing he had to bear in his 738 days of Hamas captivity was not physical or mental torture, but the constant starvation.

“It’s a hunger that you can’t get used to. It feels like the body is eating itself from the inside,” he said. “You get used to the bombings, the fear, the danger – but not to the hunger.”

He described how food was used as a cruel game.

“In the water we were supposed to drink, there were these kinds of small fish. I would filter them with a gauze pad,” he said.

“They would give us some rice, full of worms, and what would you do – separate the rice from the worms? So you just close your eyes and eat. What else would you do? We would say, ‘It’s protein.’”

“Sometimes it was a few black seeds that we had to divide among ourselves,” he recalled. “Sometimes there was a big pot that you look at and say, ‘Wow,’ and then open it and discover a thin layer of something – some leftovers of theirs – at the bottom.”

Saying that he felt like the “living dead” while existing “in an underground grave,” at one point Kalfon became so desperate that he tried planning an escape.

“I thought to myself, what’s preferable, to undergo what I’m undergoing? The torture, the suffering, the hunger, this danger to life – and who knows if at the end I’ll even remain alive? Maybe I could have a 50% chance that I could be saved and live,” he said.

“I actually had an escape route planned out in my head, I sketched out what I was going to do and how – but the friends who were with me stopped me,” he said.

Kalfon was first held in various apartments with Yosef Chaim Ohana and Maxim Herkin before a nearby IDF bombing led their captors to move them into a tunnel for 11 months, together with Ohad Ben Ami, Elkanah Bohbot and Bar Kuperstein.

When asked what he thought could help him heal after such a terrible ordeal, the 27-year-old answered that talking about his horrific experiences is healing, as is his Jewish faith, “which has strengthened” since being captured at the Nova dance festival during the Hamas invasion of Oct. 7, 2023, during which the terrorists massacred nearly 1,200 men, women and children and overall took 251 hostages.

In previous interviews, Kalfon talked of how he eventually came to terms with his fear of dying, whether from IDF bombings or at the hands of his captors who beat him often.

“Death becomes your best friend. You talk to death all the time” while in the pitch-black Hamas tunnels, he said.

The post After two years in Gaza, freed hostage recalls starvation and desperation appeared first on World Israel News.

He was starved, beaten often and severely, and forced to dig tunnels for his captors.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Segev Kalfon, one of the 20 live Israeli hostages freed as part of the Trump peace deal on Oct. 10, revealed part of his horrific experiences as a captive to Ynet and Yedioth Ahronoth on Tuesday.

He was captured by Hamas forces while attempting to flee the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, 2023, and was beaten so severely all over his body he thought he might die on the spot, he said.

When brought to Gaza, he was asked his name, and every time he said it he was beaten, and a knife was even pressed to his throat.

It turned out that “Segev” sounds like the Arabic word for “ceiling,” so the terrorists did not believe him.

After a few hours, when they called him “Steve” instead, he decided not to correct them.

He was held in various apartments with Yosef Chaim Ohana and Maxim Herkin before a nearby IDF bombing led their captors to move them into a tunnel, together with Ohad Ben Ami, Elkanah Bohbot, and Bar Kuperstein.

They were forced to dig tunnels for their captors, as well as holes for latrines for both captors and captives to use, “because Jews are zeroes, nothings,” he said.

The group was together for 11 long months and was in constant danger of their lives, he said.

The feeling was “something that accompanied you there every day, every morning, every moment,” he explained.

In such a situation, he said, “death becomes your best friend, you talk to death all the time. It’s impossible to describe it, in the end you come to terms with the fact that your life is always in danger.”

The beatings continued underground, especially when an Israeli politician would say things that angered their captors.

He gave as an example Internal Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s televised description of the harsh prison conditions of the Hamas Nukhba terrorists that the IDF had caught.

Considering that they sat in “complete darkness,” any light was welcome, but the glow of an approaching flashlight “became a sign of evil coming to us,” Kalfon said. “We knew we were about to be beaten, we were afraid, we clung to the walls and prepared.”

They slept on paper-thin mattresses on a crooked floor and were given little food, which they shared equally, Kalfon said.

“Even toilet paper, when there was any, I would give out one square at a time,” he recalled. “A bottle of water was like gold. Today, nothing is taken for granted.”

Kalfon, who was also held alone for several months, did not always obey his Hamas guards.

He decided to resist making a propaganda video for them by not looking into the camera or saying the lines written out for him.

“I played it like a bad actor because I thought about my parents, my family. I didn’t want to say that a tunnel had collapsed on me, that I was suffering and hungry, that my life was in danger,” he said.

Kalfon’s family, who had been told by an eyewitness of their son’s capture, only found out that Segev was still alive in February, when Ohad Ben Ami was released in the second hostage deal.

At the time, Ben Ami told them that Kalfon, an IDF combat veteran who had come out of the army suffering from PTSD, was experiencing panic attacks, dissociative episodes and fits of rage while in captivity.

The post Ex-hostage Segev Kalfon: ‘Death becomes your best friend’ appeared first on World Israel News.

Those freed said they were starved and then force-fed, treated without anesthetic and chained for months in Hamas tunnels.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Some of the hostages freed Monday have begun telling their families about the torture they underwent at the hands of their Hamas captors over the past two years.

Matan Angrest was badly burned on his right hand as he fought off Hamas fighters in his tank on Oct. 7, 2023, before being captured.

When caught, he was beaten until he lost consciousness, his mother, Anat, told Channel 12 in an interview.

The Gazans who treated his burns did so without giving him any anesthetic.

“He has several other injuries, including to his vision,” Anat said.

Her son underwent “very severe torture” in the first months of captivity because he was a soldier, she added, and “suffered severe psychological warfare – that we gave up on them, that [Hamas] was going to conquer the country, that they are planning the next Oct. 7.”

For the last four months of his captivity, Angrest was held in small, dark tunnels in areas where the IDF was active, and several times the walls collapsed on him due to bombing.

Alon Ohel is in danger of losing his sight completely in his left eye due to shrapnel penetrating it on the day of the invasion, and there is a risk to his right eye as well.

He also has shrapnel all over his hands, head and chest, which was never removed during the two years of his captivity.

Prof. Hagai Levine, head of the health team of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, told Fox News Digital that “beyond those who were physically injured, almost all endured prolonged deprivation of medical care…resulting in infections, chronic discomfort and overall physical decline” that will have “deep and lasting effects on their health.”

Many hostages said they were starved by their captors. Channel 11 reported some saying their guards made a point of eating in front of them to make them suffer more.

This kind of torment in the face of their prisoners’ deprivation was commonly reported by previously released hostages as well.

Evyatar David was recently shown in a Hamas propaganda film in a dark tunnel, emaciated to the point of looking like a Holocaust survivor.

In an act of psychological torture, his captors gave him a shovel to dig what they said would be his own grave.

Elkana Bohbot’s wife, Rivka, told a press conference at Sheba Hospital that while her husband was starved throughout his captivity, in recent days he was tortured in the opposite way – being forced to eat large amounts of food “so that he would look a little better to the world.”

“Because of this, Elkana is suffering from stomach pains and is swollen,” she said, besides having pain in his lower back and legs.

He was not the only hostage to report being force-fed recently, which medical authorities consider extremely dangerous to victims’ health and potentially fatal.

Several hostages said they were kept in Hamas tunnels throughout their captivity, with some, such as Bohbot, also chained for months at a time.

When imminent cease-fire deals collapsed, some hostages were treated more roughly than usual.

Rom Broslavsky’s uncle told Walla that the change was “extreme.”

“You’re dealing with psychopaths,” he said.

While some hostages were alone for part of their time in captivity, others – including Avinatan Or, Ariel Cunio and brothers Gali and Ziv Berman – were kept isolated throughout their two years under Hamas captivity and were not told what was happening in the outside world during that time.

The post Hostages tell of psychological and physical abuse in Hamas captivity appeared first on World Israel News.

The IDF’s Yahalom Unit specializes in tunnel warfare, engaging terrorists where no other army has fought—dozens of meters underground, where every turn can hide a deadly trap.

The post WATCH: Inside the Yahalom unit that battles Hamas underground appeared first on World Israel News.

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.”

The post Former hostage Tal Shoham – ‘I refused to kneel’ appeared first on World Israel News.

Starved of food and companionship, Omer Shem Tov used his faith and mental toughness to survive Hamas captivity.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Starved of food and companionship, Omer Shem Tov used his faith and emotional strength to survive Hamas captivity, his parents told Channel 13 in an interview Monday.

Omer was kidnapped from the Nova dance festival during Hamas’s October 7, 2023, invasion, along with two friends, Maya and Itay Regev. They remained together until the brother and sister were released in the first hostage deal, which occurred in late November that year.

He didn’t see another friendly face for the next 13 months, and for a whopping 50 days, he was in complete isolation, his parents, Shelly and Malki, said.

The terrorists put him in a very deep tunnel that was pitch dark and so low he couldn’t stand up, and so narrow he couldn’t stretch his arms out, they said.

“They gave him a flashlight and a just a tiny bit of food and sea water, and left him there,” Malki said.

He had to ration himself, eating at first two pitot a day, then one, then a half, then just a cookie, because he didn’t know how long he’d be there.

“Mom, I was so thin I could feel my bones,” Shelly recounted him telling her.

Then the battery in the flashlight died, and for five days, he was “in total, utter darkness,” Malki said.

“On the fifth day, he spoke to God,” Shelly said, “praying, ‘Please, God, get me out of here, it doesn’t matter to where,’ and he said that two hours later his captor came.”

The Hamas terrorists took him to a wider tunnel, one tiled with white tiles, which seemed like real light to him.

“Even in hell there seem to be degrees of hell,” his father remarked with a small chuckle.

The Shem Tovs spoke about Omer’s faith and how it helped him.

Once, when he saw a terrorist using his prayer beads, they said, “Omer told him, ‘Come, I’ll teach you something else: ‘God was, is, and will always be king,’” a common line in Jewish prayer, said especially on the holidays.

His captors also gave him a book on the weekly Torah readings that a Jewish soldier had left behind, “which he’d like to return” now, the Shem Tovs said with a smile, as the man’s name was written on it.

“He also received Psalm 100,” Shelly said, “which I would read all the time here… and he read this psalm in captivity every day.”

“It’s unbelievable,” she said, marveling at the coincidence.

Omer also told his parents that he never showed fear to his captors, knowing that if he did, “they would take advantage of it.”

This included when IDF tanks rumbled right over his tunnel, shaking the ground, and he could even hear soldiers speaking in Hebrew – and his captors told him, his parents said, that if they got too close or attempted a rescue, “they would shoot him in the head.”

Shelly, who sat by Omer’s bedside the entire first night that he returned, not sleeping and just holding his hand and watching him breathe, said that the word “joy” has a different meaning for her now.

Instead of “waking up in fear every morning… it’s opening your eyes and saying, ‘Wow. Wow,’” she recounted with a huge smile and sparkling eyes.

Seeing him for the first time in 505 days and hugging him fiercely “was really like giving birth to my child again,” she said.

The post ‘There are degrees of hell in hell’ – freed hostage’s parents speak out appeared first on World Israel News.

The Gazan terrorist group, far from deterred, is already preparing for another round of fighting, says military reporter.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Far from being deterred, Hamas is using the current ceasefire period to rearm and rebuild so it can attack Israel again, Yediot Ahronot reported Tuesday.

Thousands of terrorists have returned to central and northern Gaza, where they had been hiding in refugee camps and preserving their weapons on orders from their top command “once they realized Hezbollah had abandoned [Hamas],” wrote military reporter Yoav Zitun.

The Lebanese Iranian proxy did not try a mass invasion of Israel after the Hamas massacres of October 7, 2023, contenting itself with showing support by firing over 10,000 missiles, rockets, and UAVs at northern Israel over the 15 months of war.

The terrorists could move freely among the hundreds of thousands of civilians who started walking back to their hometowns right after the ceasefire began last month, since Israel quickly abandoned the Netzarim Corridor that had divided the Strip roughly in half.

Only those going north by car are inspected by security contractors as to their identities and belongings.

According to Zitun, these fighters found “many hundreds of terrorists” who had never left Gaza City and its environs over the course of the war.

Together, they have reconstituted themselves into new companies and battalions and staffed them with new commanders, he wrote.

While the flow of arms from outside has been halted due to the IDF’s presence on all sides of the coastal enclave, especially on the Philadelphi Corridor at the Egyptian-Gazan border, the terror organization has found an “inside” source, the report added.

“Hamas has gathered, over the last month, a large amount of explosives from the arsenal of the IDF after it retreated,” Zitun wrote, “enabling it to booby-trap areas with bombs and create new weapons for its forces.”

In January 2024, The New York Times reported that Israeli investigators had found that military-grade contents of Hamas rockets came from unexploded ordnance fired by the Israeli air force in earlier rounds of clashes in Gaza.

According to Yediot Ahronot, the group is also repairing tunnels that the IDF damaged and preparing those that were not found, including for offensive purposes.

The terrorists have also both set up stationary cameras and begun using drones for observation purposes in many central points in the Strip in an attempt to rebuild its intelligence capabilities.

In addition, the report said, “Hamas has managed to locate and re-aim not a few rocket launchers” that the IDF did not find and destroy during the war.

Perhaps to send a message that it is still capable of doing so, they have fired four rockets towards Israel in the last week, although they did no damage, having been shot down or falling within the Strip.

In another sign that it has not been deterred, Zitun noted, Hamas has renewed its civilian governance of the Strip, providing municipal services and collecting taxes from the distribution of food and fuel aid that Israel brings in, in order to pay its members’ salaries.”

The IDF, he concluded, is finalizing its own preparations for another widespread land and air operation, knowing that while Hamas has been greatly damaged, “there is still a lot of work to do to finish it off militarily.”

The post Hamas using ceasefire period to rearm and rebuild – report appeared first on World Israel News.

Sagui Dekel-Chen, Alexandre (Sasha) Troufanov and Iair Horn suffered unspeakable conditions in Hamas captivity.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Sagui Dekel-Chen, Alexandre (Sasha) Troufanov and Iair Horn, the three hostages freed Saturday, have begun revealing the unspeakable conditions in which they were held during 498 days of Hamas captivity, Channel 12 and Kan News reported Sunday.

The trio, who were kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz, were held almost the entire time in tunnels under Khan Yunis, only a few miles away from their point of capture.

The underground passages were moldy and infested with lice and bedbugs. The hostages were also given practically no food and only salty water to drink, which only increased their thirst.

Hamas suspected some of the men of being IDF soldiers, although all three men were over army age.

American-Israeli Dekel-Chen (36) underwent frequent interrogations to reveal intelligence that he did not have, and the results of the torture have left scars on his body, Channel 12 reported.

He was also shot in his right shoulder when Hamas forces overran Nir Oz and he went to fight the terrorists while leaving his pregnant wife and two young daughters inside their home’s safe room.

Dekel-Chen reported that he was completely cut off from all means of communication over these 16 months and lived with the constant thought that his family had been murdered in the kibbutz.

He was only informed that they were alive just before his release, including the fact that his wife had given birth to a third daughter some two months after his capture.

Russian-Israeli Alexandre (Sasha) Troufanov, 29, was shot in both legs and brutally beaten when captured by the terrorists.

Unlike the others, he was held alone his entire time in captivity, and learned to read and write Arabic as a means to keep busy.

He was only updated irregularly by his captors as to what was happening in the war but did hear on the radio that his mother and girlfriend, who had been captured along with him but whom he never saw, had been freed in the first deal with Hamas in November 2023.

Troufanov’s and Dekel-Chen’s wounds were left untreated the whole time in captivity, and it is likely that they will have to undergo surgery to repair their injuries.

Horn (46) lost several dozen kilograms during his time in captivity and did not receive regular medical treatment.

He had been kidnapped along with his brother, Eitan (37), who had come to the kibbutz for the Simchat Torah holiday that was being celebrated on October 7.

The brothers were at first held together but then were separated, and Horn does not know Eitan’s current condition.

The three hostages were exchanged for 369 Palestinian security prisoners, including 36 senior terrorists serving life sentences.

While the deal’s parameters were that 30 terrorists would be released for every male civilian, Israel also promised to release 1,000 Palestinians who were detained since the

October 7 Hamas-led invasion and did not participate in the day’s massacre of 1,200 people.

Some of this cohort are seemingly being freed every week, which is why the number of freed prisoners is so high.

The post Torture, lice-ridden tunnels, salty water – freed hostages speak out appeared first on World Israel News.

Held both above and below ground and moved dozens of times, one was forced to have a medical procedure without anesthetics.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The three hostages released Sunday have begun to share details of their captivity and the terror they felt even as they were being released with a crowd of Hamas fighters surrounding them, Channel 12 reported Tuesday.

Doron Steinbrecher, Romy Gonen, and Emily Damari were often but not always kept together, they said, cooking and helping each other.

Gonen, who had been a medic, cared for Damari’s wounded hand and leg as best she could under the circumstances, according to Hebrew-language media.

They were moved dozens of times over the 15 months of the war, with some of them forced to spend the vast majority of their captivity in tunnels and not seeing the light of day.

Some also spent time in places above ground, including humanitarian areas set up by the IDF in the Gaza Strip for civilians who were ordered out of their cities before the army would engage Hamas forces there.

Some received medications they needed, but at least one had to undergo a medical procedure without being given any anesthetic for the pain.

Their captors sometimes allowed them to watch the rallies for the hostages in Israel on television and even heard their families on the radio fighting for them. They also were exposed to what happened during the Hamas-led invasion, they said.

“We understood that our families survived but found out that we had lost a lot of friends,” they said.

They were terrified about what would happen to them, with one of them saying, “I didn’t think I would return. I was sure I would die in Gaza.”

They had no idea they would be freed until Sunday morning, they said, and “couldn’t believe it when they told us we would be home very soon.”

Their joy was tempered with fear at the end because of Hamas’s last act of cruelty.

“We were deathly afraid at the transfer point from the hands of the terrorists to the Red Cross,” they said, “because of the combination of the armed terrorists and the crowds of Gazans” that surrounded them as they moved from the Hamas cars to those of the international body, whose sole role in the conflict has been as a taxi service between Gaza and Israel for released hostages.

Video of the transfer that Hamas publicized showed the women getting out of their car completely surrounded and hemmed in by dozens of uniformed and masked men holding automatic weapons.

Many of the Arabs dressed in civilian clothing were yelling phrases such as “Allahu Akbar [God is great]” as they held up cellphones to record the event, a fact that belies the image Hamas tries to project to the world of a poor and starving population.

The vagueness of which hostage said what was due to the censorship rules the media outlet has to abide by, the report noted.

The post ‘I thought I’d die in Gaza’ – Released hostages begin to share their ordeals appeared first on World Israel News.

Two decades of gathering weapons and building tunnels cannot be gotten rid of so quickly, says Dr. Eitan Shamir of the BESA Center.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The final military defeat of Hamas could take years, considering the time it has had to build its terror infrastructure, the director of a Middle East policy-oriented think tank told The Media Line Wednesday.

“Hamas had over twenty years to accumulate a massive amount of firepower, dispersing it in many areas, including in its widespread underground tunnel network,” said Dr. Eitan Shamir, director of Bar Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA Center).

“Combined with other terrorist organizations, such as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), it had approximately 30,000 fighters. This could take two to three years to get rid of.”

The IDF said more than six months ago that it had destroyed or completely degraded all of Hamas’s 24 military brigades. However, according to a recent Channel 12 report, the two groups have managed to recruit new men and now have between 20,000 to 23,000 fighters.

Although the new recruits are barely trained in comparison to their predecessors, the army still has to root them out in major military operations, going back into places where it had already fought once or twice before.

For example, in the just-concluded round in the northern part of the Strip, the IDF said more than 300 terrorists were killed.

The Israeli army’s death toll in the ground offensive so far in Gaza stands at 398, with three soldiers losing their lives in the last two days.

According to Yoni Ben Menachem, a Middle East expert from the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, a think tank specializing in public and foreign policy, Hamas’s tunnel network is also a big threat that will take time to defeat.

“There is an estimated 40% of the tunnels still remaining, hundreds of kilometers of tunnels the Israeli intelligence was not aware of,” he told The Media Line.

“There are still very long tunnels that Israel has yet to have located, some of them with hostages inside,” he noted. “This requires a very big operation and a massive amount of explosives that Israel currently does not possess.”

The IDF has estimated that there are up to 450 miles of tunnels in the Strip. It has concentrated on destroying the largest and most strategically important ones, including those closest to the border with Israel, while damaging key points in others to render them unusable.

Whether they stay inoperable is questionable, however, as a Channel 12 report in July cited an IDF assessment that the terrorists had managed to repair “many” tunnels in Khan Yunis, for example.

“Israel does not have enough forces at this point to subdue Hamas both militarily and in its ability to govern Gaza,” Ben Menachem added. “In order to do that, Israel needs to occupy the entire Gaza Strip and announce it is enforcing temporary military administration.”

This is the preferred option of the more right-wing members of the current coalition.

The outgoing Biden administration had flatly refused to endorse such a plan, desiring that a “reformed” Palestinian Authority (PA) take over on “the day after.”

Considering the PA’s ongoing encouragement of terrorism, this idea has been shot down several times by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has yet to produce any concrete proposals regarding the governance of the Gaza Strip after the war’s goal of Hamas’s “total defeat” is achieved.

The post Defeating Hamas could take 2-3 years, think tank warns appeared first on World Israel News.

‘Their four battalions have been destroyed, and we have completed operational control over the entire urban area.’

By Vered Weiss, World Israel News

The IDF announced that Hamas’s Rafah brigade has been defeated, 2,308 terrorists have been killed, and 13 kilometers of tunnels have been destroyed.

Israel now has control of the Philadelphi corridor and is in the process of destroying the remaining tunnels, which should not take more than a few weeks.

It is uncertain what Israel will do in Rafah and the Philadelphi corridor since hostage and ceasefire proposals, which are currently stalled, have called for a retreat of the IDF from the Gaza Strip.

Israeli military officials say they would carry out any missions the political echelon feels is necessary.

Brig. Gen. Itzik Cohen, who is in charge of operations in Rafah, said, “The Rafah Brigade has been defeated.”

He added, “Their four battalions have been destroyed, and we have completed operational control over the entire urban area.”

Cohen said his combat engineering forces discovered 203 separate but connected tunnels in the Philadelphi corridor.

Of this number, nine extended to Egypt from Gaza, but all of these were blocked up either by Egypt or by Hamas.

“There are nine underground sites [tunnels] that cross into Egyptian territory, but they have collapsed, they are not usable, they are not active,” he said.

It is known that some of Hamas’s extensive tunnel network have extended into Egyptian territory.

Egypt has tried to obstruct and destroy these tunnels by flooding them, pumping toxic gas into them, and destroying homes and buildings in the area to create a buffer zone.

According to Israeli investigations, as Egypt worked to destroy Hamas’s tunnel system, weapons were not smuggled through the tunnel system; instead, smuggling took place at the Rafah Border Crossing with Egypt.

Also, a certain amount of Hamas’s weapons, including rockets, RPGs, and explosive devices, were locally made.

The tunnel system in Rafah is larger than in other areas of Gaza, with IDF officials calling it the “umm al-anfaq,” the mother of tunnels in Arabic.

The post IDF: Hamas’s Rafah brigade defeated, most of its tunnels destroyed appeared first on World Israel News.

Adina Moshe cultivated a relationship with her guards and managed to get the two freed for a few hours to talk to their fellow kibbutz abductees.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

One of the women released from Hamas captivity in the November hostage deal revealed for the first time on Army Radio Thursday that she had met Yarden Bibas and Ofer Kalderon from her kibbutz while down in the tunnels where they were all being held.

Adina Moshe told interviewer Ilana Dayan that she had walked to an area that was completely dark and found the two Nir Oz residents caged in pens, like animals.

“I asked, ‘Why are you in a pen?’” she recounted. “They said they didn’t know. When I asked if they had confronted Hamas – it turned out that they had.”

Moshe said she had cultivated a friendly relationship with her captors, knowing that it could help her group, and after waiting two days she approached her guards’ commander.

“I told him that I’d heard voices in Hebrew, and I told him, ‘They are from Nir Oz.’ He asked me, ‘How do you know?’ I told him that he should bring them to be with us, and after two days he brought them to us for an hour or so, and then brought them back to the cage. The next day he brought them to us for two hours.”

Bibas told her that he hoped his wife and two young boys had not been kidnapped as well, she said, since he had left them in the safe room to confront the terrorists who had broken into their home. “All the terrorists” in his home had taken him away, first to a gathering point in the kibbutz and then to Khan Younis, she said he told her.

The video of Hamas terrorists abducting his wife Shiri, nine-month-old Kfir and four-year-old Ariel, who are being held close by their obviously terrified mother, is one of the most infamous of all the footage of hostages brutally being taken by the terrorists to the Gaza Strip.

Moshe added that she had tried to find out if the three were being held by Hamas or other terrorists, and all she was told by the guards was that they would try and find out.

In late November, Hamas claimed that Shiri, Ariel and Kfir had been killed in an Israeli air strike, but has never provided proof. The family remains committed to the belief that the whole family is still alive in captivity.

Moshe is a strident advocate for Israel agreeing to any price for a hostage deal and speaks at many rallies calling on the government to seal an agreement with Hamas.

When she spoke at a Kiryat Gat rally Saturday, she referred to the six hostages recently shot and killed by their Hamas guards in a tunnel in Rafah when they saw IDF forces approaching.

She told the crowd that after she was released, she was questioned by the Shabak in order to gain as much knowledge as possible about the terrorists and their tunnels.

She said that she told her questioner that “The moment the IDF enters these tunnels, it will be impossible to save the hostages because Hamas will murder them immediately, in accordance with its faith and ways.”

The terrorists have nothing to lose when they see the Israelis approaching, she explained. “They will murder the hostages because by doing so they’re sure that they are [at least] doing something” before they die.

As for the tunnels, “I told the investigator that it was one huge maze found under the entire Strip… not a tunnel but endless channels.”

The post Released hostage visited 2 Israeli captives caged in pens like animals appeared first on World Israel News.

The handbook describes the procedure for moving within the tunnels and how to fire in the confined space for maximum lethality.

By Vered Weiss, World Israel News

A handbook recovered by the IDF from Gaza City’s Zeitoun District in November demonstrate that Hamas developed an extensive combat strategy for tunnel warfare over years, The New York Times reports.

The handbook describes the procedure for moving within the tunnels and how to fire in the confined space for maximum lethality.

The manual gave instructions on how commanders could time to the second how long terrorists would take to travel between certain points in the tunnels.

Although Israel was aware of the tunnel network in Gaza, the complexity and extent of the tunnel network exceeded what Israel’s military had anticipated.

Before the war, Israel estimated the tunnels were 250 miles long, but they have turned out to be double that length.

Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who is believed to be running the war from a tunnel in Gaza, approved $225,000 spending on blast doors in tunnels that can protect against airstrikes and ground assaults.

The manual also teaches terrorists how to disguise entrances of tunnels and locate them through GPS.

Hamas members were told to use infrared goggles in the tunnels and to fire from the shoulder to hit the upper body, increasing the odds of killing the soldier.

However, the underground battles the manual prepares terrorists for have not materialized since the IDF is unwilling to enter the tunnels for actual battles.

Instead, Hamas has had to adjust their tactics and ambush Israeli soldiers from outside the tunnels while engaging in hit-and-run attacks, often throwing explosives.

The tunnels have increased the duration of the war, since Israel has been forced to fight both above ground and below.

“The fact that Hamas is hiding in tunnels and managing much of the fighting from there prolongs the war,” an Israeli military official told the New York Times.

However, the IDF has still succeeded in decimating Hamas’s terror infrastructure and forcing terrorists to leave their strongholds in the tunnels.

Destroying tunnels is time-consuming, and eliminating a single section can take many soldiers as long as ten hours.

“I cannot overstate that in any way. The tunnels impact the pace of the operations,” said Daphné Richemond-Barak, a tunnel warfare expert at Reichman University in Israel. “You can’t advance. You can’t secure the terrain.”

“You’re dealing with two wars,” she added. “One on the surface and one on the subsurface.”

The post Recovered handbook outlines Hamas’s tunnel combat strategy appeared first on World Israel News.

The hostages were murdered on Oct. 7th and their bodies were brought into Gaza, where they remained until IDF forces conducted an operation to recover them and return them to their families.

The post WATCH: IDF demolishes tunnel where hostages’ bodies were found appeared first on World Israel News.