The father of Hisham al-Sayed, a Bedouin Muslim who was returned to Israel after nearly a decade in Gaza captivity, on Sunday urged “the Arab world” to speak out against abuses by Hamas.
Sayed, 37, was released by the Palestinian terror group on Saturday under the ceasefire and hostage release deal with Israel. The man, whose family has said he is diagnosed with schizophrenia, entered the Gaza Strip while in mental distress in 2015 and was taken hostage.
Sayed was one of two hostages held alive in the Gaza Strip for over a decade. The other, Avera Mengistu, who entered the enclave in 2014, was also released on Saturday. Hamas also killed and captured two Israeli soldiers in 2014 — Lt. Hadar Goldin and Staff. Sgt. Oron Shaul.
Shaul’s body was recovered by Israeli troops last month, but Goldin’s body remains in Hamas captivity.
“At the start of his captivity, when there were four hostages in Gaza, I thought that Hamas members would keep him safe, because it was in their interest” to exchange him for Palestinian security prisoners in Israeli jails, said Sayed’s father, Sha’ban al-Sayed.
Speaking to journalists at a hospital in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv, he said that after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, in which some 1,200 people were killed and 251 were seized as hostages, “I began to tremble with fear.”
“I saw that Bedouins and Arabs were killed, working people who weren’t soldiers or fighters,” said Sayed.
“The Arab world doesn’t react, doesn’t give any response to that, doesn’t take any stance,” he said.
“We want the Arab world, and particularly Arab society in Israel, to voice their opinion: What do they think about the fact that innocent people were kidnapped and murdered?”
Several members of the Bedouin community were taken captive by Hamas on October 7, including four members of one family — Youssef Ziyadne, and three of his children, Hamza, Bilal, and Aisha.
Bilal, 18, and Aisha, 17, were released during a weeklong truce in late November 2023, and in January 2025, the IDF recovered the bodies of Youssef and Hamza from southern Gaza.
Farhan al-Qadi, another member of the same Bedouin Rahat community, was also abducted on October 7 and was rescued by the IDF in August 2024.
Sayed accused Hamas of violating the teachings of Islam by exploiting his son who “has mental problems.”
“When we got Hisham back, we were relieved to see him walking on his legs,” the father added, “but as I held him in my arms, I realized I was hugging a body… not a human being.”
“He doesn’t talk. He doesn’t have a voice. He can’t remember anything. It’s like he hadn’t been with other human beings” during his years in captivity, he said.
“This makes us angry,” added Sayed, calling to intensify efforts to free all remaining hostages in Gaza.
Terror groups in the Gaza Strip are still holding 62 of the 251 hostages abducted by Hamas-led terrorists on October 7, 2023. They include the bodies of at least 36 confirmed dead by the IDF.
Hamas has so far released 30 hostages — 20 Israeli civilians, five soldiers, and five Thai nationals — and the bodies of four slain Israeli captives — Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas, and Oded Lifshitz — during a ceasefire that began in January. The terror group freed 105 civilians during a weeklong truce in late November 2023, and four hostages were released before that in the early weeks of the war.
Eight hostages have been rescued from captivity by troops alive, and the bodies of 41 have also been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the Israeli military as they tried to escape their captors, and the body of a soldier who was killed in 2014.