Israeli hostage Itzik Elgarat was tortured to death by his Hamas captors and did not die of a heart attack during an interrogation as had originally been believed, his brother Danny Elgarat said on Thursday, citing autopsy findings.
Itzik Elgarat, 68, was in his Kibbutz Nir Oz home on the morning of October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists attacked. They shot him through his safe room door, injuring him, and took him captive. He was among 251 people abducted from Israel when the terror group led thousands of gunmen in a devastating invasion of southern Israel that also killed 1,200 people.
In June, Danny Elgarat told lawmakers during a Knesset House Committee that intelligence officials believed his brother had “suffered a heart attack during interrogation under torture.”
But on Thursday, after receiving the results of his older brother’s autopsy, Elgarat said it contradicted the previous version of events.
“Itzik did not die of a heart attack! Today, after my brother’s autopsy, things are clear,” he wrote on X.
“Itzik did not die of a heart attack,” he repeated. “Itzik was tortured to death during an interrogation.”
He said that his brother’s body had been returned to Israel “with numerous broken ribs as a result of external pressure on the chest, with broken toes and a broken nose.”
“Itzik was brutally murdered,” he added.
Elgarat said that the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute, which conducted the autopsy, had been unable to “legally determine the definite cause of death,” but had assessed that the extent of his injuries was severe enough that they “could have caused his death.”
Elgarat said, however, that he didn’t need the forensic institute to give him a definitive answer as to what killed his brother, as the real cause was “Mr. Abandonment” — the moniker given to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by many of the families of the hostages and their supporters.
“That is the cause of death of all the victims of the October 7 holocaust,” concluded Elgarat, who has become one of Netanyahu’s most vocal critics in the 22 months since his brother was abducted from his home.
“Our families, like many others, will neither forget nor forgive,” he wrote earlier on Thursday, prior to receiving the results of his brother’s autopsy.
“The responsibility is clear. The failure is clear. The cause of death is clear,” he wrote.
In June, Elgarat told the Knesset House Committee that Hamas had believed his brother to be an Israeli Air Force pilot because he had a tattoo of an eagle on his arm.
“They took him for interrogation and he never came back,” he said.
The date of Itzik’s death was not clear, although he was known to have been alive until at least January 2024, when, according to intelligence officials, he was moved from Khan Younis to Rafah.
Itzik had been held with Edan Alexander, a US-Israeli IDF soldier who was released from captivity in May 2025 in what was seen as a goodwill gesture by Hamas to US President Donald Trump.
Elgarat told the Knesset committee that Alexander had inquired after Itzik when he failed to return, to which his Hamas captors simply told him: “He’s gone.”
Elgarat’s body was returned by Hamas in February 2025, as part of a ceasefire deal that saw dozens of hostages, dead and alive, returned to Israel. He was buried close to his home in Nir Oz. At the funeral, Danny proclaimed that Netanyahu had “dug his grave.”
Also on Thursday, six former hostages and the widow of a hostage murdered in captivity released an English-language video urging Trump to bring an end to the war in Gaza, and warning him that Israel’s new plans to greatly expand its military offensive and conquer Gaza City put the remaining hostages at risk.
The former captives featured in the video were Naama Levy, Ohad Ben Ami, Doron Steinbrecher, Sasha Troufanov, Arbel Yehoud and Iair Horn, whose brother Eitan Horn is still held in Gaza. They were joined by Michal Lobanov, the wife of Alex Lobanov, who was kidnapped alive and murdered by his captors in August 2024, with his body returned to Israel days later.
Highlighting the risk posed to the hostages by expanded military action in Gaza, Lobanov said: “For my family, it was already too late. When the military pressure closed in, Hamas executed my husband. He came back to me in a coffin.”
“President Trump, please act now, before it’s too late for them, too,” she pleaded.
Appealing to the US president’s publicly stated desire to be remembered as a peacemaker and receive the Nobel Peace Prize, Horn pleaded: “President Trump, you have the power to make history, to be the ‘President of Peace’ who ended the war, ended the suffering, and brought every hostage home.”