Freed hostage Omer Wenkert on Sunday related the harrowing conditions in which he was held in Hamas’s tunnels, saying they worsened with the Israeli offensive on Rafah, in southern Gaza, in May 2024.

“They intentionally starved me,” he told the Bar Association conference, adding that he was fed half a pita a day for two or three weeks.

“Around the entry to Rafah, [there was] intentional starvation, and intentional abuse,” he said. “They did things that seriously endangered my life, for fun.”

“One of them brought insect repellent, stood me up at the end of the corridor, and sprayed me in the face, with my eyes open,” Wenkert recalled, adding that his captor ensured everything he would touch was also sprayed.

“He also decided to beat me with an iron rod,” he recalled.

Wenkert said he was alone for six and a half months, and his captors would only “approach me once in a while.”

He said that around the 80th day of his captivity, he was moved from one underground corridor to another, which he described as “a dark room with a little lamp.”

“They tried to drive me crazy — to damage my sense of time,” he said. “When they put down food for me, they told me to turn around, so they could leave. Bathing was once in 50 days, with a little bottle. Only after nine and a half months did I bathe for real.”

The tunnel he was kept in for most of his captivity was “about 90 centimeters (35 inches) wide, and about 9-10 meters (29-32 feet) long,” with a hole as a bathroom, he recalled.

“I was on a small mattress, with my back against the wall. I was there for 420 days, I think,” he said.

On June 13, 2024, his captors brought fellow hostages Evyatar David and Guy Gilboa-Dalal to the same corridor in which Wenkert was kept. They are both still in Hamas captivity, 597 days since their abduction on October 7, 2023.

“My mental state settled down [with their arrival], but it became more crowded; we split food and water, the physical conditions worsened — but the abuse stopped,” Wenkert said.

Wenkert, now 23, was among at least 40 people taken hostage by terrorists on October 7 at the Supernova desert rave, where some 360 partygoers were murdered.

He was released on February 22, 2025, after 505 days in Hamas captivity, as part of a hostage release-ceasefire deal between Israel and the terror group that ultimately collapsed after its first phase.

Terror groups in the Gaza Strip are still holding 58 hostages, including 57 of the 251 abducted by Hamas-led terrorists on October 7. Among them are the bodies of at least 35 confirmed dead by the IDF, and 20 who are believed to be alive. There are grave concerns for the well-being of three others, Israeli officials have said.

Hamas released 30 hostages — 20 Israeli civilians, five soldiers, and five Thai nationals — and the bodies of eight slain Israeli captives during a ceasefire between January and March, and one additional hostage, a dual American-Israeli citizen, in May as a “gesture” to the United States.

The terror group had 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. In exchange, Israel has freed some 2,000 jailed Palestinian terrorists, security prisoners, and Gazan terror suspects detained during the war.

Eight hostages have been rescued alive from captivity by troops, and the bodies of 41 have also been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the Israeli military when they tried to escape their captors, as well as the body of a soldier who was killed in 2014.

The body of another soldier killed in 2014 is still being held by Hamas and is counted among the 58 hostages.