"Hello, my name is Yahya Sinwar. You are better protected here than anywhere else. Nothing will happen to you here," the Hamas leader in Gaza is reported to have said to Israeli hostages in the Hebrew he learned in prison, according to a testimony gathered by Israeli television channel Twelfth. The brief encounter took place on the day itself of the attack, October 7, in a tunnel not far from Khan Yunis, a town in southern Gaza, where residents of the Nir Oz kibbutz, including the witness who reported this scene, had been taken.
This is the only time Sinwar appeared, according to the initial accounts from hostages freed as part of the exchanges negotiated between Israel and Hamas. Given to relatives or the media, these accounts are necessarily limited, if only because many other hostages remain captive in the Palestinian enclave.
Although the conditions of detention were sometimes difficult, it seems that the hostages were not mistreated. Members of the Munder family, who were released on the first day of the exchange, were not given food regularly and had to sleep on benches, but they were not tortured, Merav Raviv, one of their relatives, told the newspaper Ynet. Nine-year-old Irish-Israeli Emily Hand, from Be'eri kibbutz, was emaciated when she left captivity. She always had breakfast, but other meals were more random, according to her father, Thomas Hand, who spoke to CNN. She was never beaten, she said, but had to avoid making noise. They let her draw and play cards.
Eitan Yahalomi's grandmother told the Haaretz newspaper that her 12-year-old grandson, a French-Israeli from Nir Oz kibbutz, spent the first 16 days of his captivity in solitary confinement. He was then moved with other hostages from his kibbutz. "Each child will receive a nutritional supplement depending on the assessment they get," Ronit Lubetzky, head of the pediatrics department at Ichilov Hospital, told reporters. The children will also be supported "by social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists too – for those who need them – to mark a return to a normal routine."
A doctor interviewed an elderly woman for Ynet, who recounted that she had not been beaten, but that she lacked medicine and food. "Their diet mainly consisted of rice, canned hummus and beans, sometimes with salty cheese and pita, but nothing more. No fruits, vegetables, or eggs. As an elderly woman, she lost 12 kilograms. From our conversation, I understood that they all tried to eat as little as possible because the beans and hummus caused constipation. They weren't used to such a diet on a daily basis," the doctor reported. Water, on the other hand, was served as much as they wanted – even though it was in short supply for the inhabitants of Gaza, who are suffering from the violent Israeli attack that has so far claimed more than 15,000 lives, according to the Palestinian authorities.
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