How do you endure 738 days of unrelenting torture, cruelty, and the constant lies of your captors, all meant to break your spirit and lose all hope?
The accounts of Israeli hostages, most taken on October 7, 2023, are truly inspiring demonstrations of the ability of the human soul to endure. After 738 horrific days in captivity, the 20 Israelis who survived captivity and their families must now steel themselves to endure the long, painful process of recovery.
Their stories are maddening, heartbreaking, and shocking to our sense of humanity. "Their testimonies paint a harrowing picture of the severe physical abuse, malnutrition, and psychological torment that they endured in the tunnels beneath Gaza," writes Novi Zhukovsky, a staff reporter for The New York Sun.
Indeed, the hostages' Hamas captors were well schooled in psychological torture. They used starvation as a weapon against their captives, not only withholding food but mocking them by telling them that the goal was to make them “poster children of skin and bones.”
The Sun reports that in the days before their release, many hostages were force-fed food. "Rapid feeding after prolonged nutrition is known to result in refeeding syndrome, a dangerous medical condition that occurs when food is reintroduced too quickly," writes Zhukovsky. The force-fed hostages experienced stomach issues as well as blood sugar problems.
The hostages endured relentless physical abuse, with those kidnapped while on active military duty facing particularly brutal treatment. The mother of 22-year-old soldier, Matan Angrest, said her son experienced “very severe torture” during his initial months in captivity and was at times “beaten so badly that he lost consciousness.”
Twenty-one-year-old Rom Braslavski, who was working as a security guard at the Nova festival when Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists abducted him, was repeatedly whipped, kept in shackles, and at times held alongside the bodies of murdered hostages, his mother told Ynet News.
Many hostages suffered from untreated injuries sustained during their kidnapping. Alon Ohen, an Israeli-Serbian pianist, was wounded by shrapnel in his eye while trying to escape terrorists at the Nova festival. He returned to Israel with severely impaired vision and shrapnel still embedded in his hands, chest, and head. He now faces the risk of permanent vision loss.
Eli Sharabi was taken hostage by Hamas and released on Feb. 8 during the abbreviated ceasefire. Terrorists broke into his home in Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7 and eventually took Sharabi hostage. He didn't learn that Hamas had slaughtered his wife and children that day until after his release.
In a first-person account published today in the Washington Post, Sharabi writes of his first hours as a hostage, describing the "ecstatic civilian mob — men, women, children — fighting to try to rip me limb from limb." He spent the first days of his captivity in the basement of a rich Palestinian's home. "Life upstairs was normal for the family — meals, schoolwork, prayers — while I lay below, my shoulders in wrenching pain from the tight ropes that bound me," he said.
Sharabi's captors tried to propagandize him with ridiculous statements about Israel and the history of the region. However, he saw a deeper problem with his captors than simply propaganda.
However, it became clear to me that the willingness to torture and murder comes from a deeper place. The murderers who broke into my house and slaughtered my wife and daughters were driven by blind hatred, which seemed to take precedence over all other motivations, including life itself.
On day 52 of my captivity — Nov. 27, 2023 — I was moved into a tunnel with six other Israeli hostages, where conditions rapidly deteriorated. Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Almog Sarusi and Ori Danino were eventually taken away from the rest of us, and I would never see them again. That left Alon Ohel, Or Levy, Elia Cohen and me (Alon remains a hostage to this day, eight months after my release). Food deprivation and disease were routine. The stench of sewage was unbearable, and there were worms everywhere.
I often play a game when reading news or history. In this game, I place myself in the life of one of the characters and ask myself, "What would I have done if I were him?"
I find it impossible to get inside the head of a Hamas terrorist who inflicted such inhumane indignities on other human beings. I have no common reference point to share with these people. I can't fathom their motivations.
Perhaps I'm not imaginative enough. Maybe my ignorance of the people and the region where they live stymies my efforts to understand them. Could the Hamas fighters be mentally ill?
Saying they "hate" Jews is not enough. The savagery and depravity of these people bespeak a lack of humanity that can only be explained by the absence of a soul.
Mr. Sharabi writes, "It’s important for the world to know that lasting peace can only come if the murderous ideology that we witnessed in Hamas and all those associated with them is defeated."
How do you "defeat" an ideology? The change needed to do that will be evolutionary in nature, not revolutionary. It will be a multi-generational effort. Right now, I can't see how it even begins.
"Real change will require the wholesale rejection of a culture that fetishizes death, and a reawakening of the desire to embrace and celebrate life," Sharabi writes.
When people celebrate the killing of innocents instead of life, the road to embracing the living of life will be a long, torturous path with no inevitable ending to the journey.
