Misery and Fear Shine Through Freed Hostage’s Account of His Captivity

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Freed hostage Ofir Engel has been recounting what he endured at the hands of his captors: “‘Animals at a zoo’: Released hostage describes terrorists bringing civilians to observe him,” Jerusalem Post, November 22, 2024:

Around 14 days later, terrorists arrived to record two hostage videos of the three captives. Engel testified that they were instructed to say that Hamas was taking care of them, feeding them, and that Israel should make a deal for their return.

In the second video, Engel and the others were told to say they were only given three dates and half a glass of water – and they could not survive on this….

The two videos, filmed one after the other, were polar opposites. In the first, the captives were instructed to say how well they were being treated, and given plenty of food, with the suggestion that Israel should make a hostage-for-prisoner swap. In the second, in direct contrast, they were told to say that they lived on only three dates and half-a-glass of water, which was leading to their starvation, and therefore Israel should make that hostage-for-prisoner swap to save their lives.

Neither video, it turns out, was used by Hamas.

A little over a week later, Engel described how terrorists arrived demanding they write goodbye letters to their loved ones, telling them they would die.

“I wrote to Yuval, to my family, to my friends,” Engel said. “I wrote a whole page, maybe even more. It was terrifying because they’d just come and say something like that and you couldn’t know whether it was true. We told ourselves that if they asked us to write the letters, it was probably true. We wrote in fear; went to sleep terrified; and realized the next morning that it wasn’t real—that they’d lied to us again. The fear kept growing and with each passing day, there was less food.”

The letters they were asked to write home, informing their families of their imminent death, were designed to make those families put pressure on the Israeli government to approve at once of a hostages-for-prisoners swap. And of course, the captive writers were full of anguish, naturally assuming that they were about to be killed.

Just before they were to be handed over to the Israelis, Hamas put on a show of sweetness and light — “they were much nicer” to the captives than their previous captors, hoping that they’d remember that last day and not the 56 days of terror they had previously endured. They gave them copious amounts of real food (“pitas, drinks, and sweets”) as part of the same attempt to make the hostages “go back with good feelings and say we were treated well.”

They murdered Yossi Shalabi. Who knows why? Just for fun? Or had he rubbed some Hamas goon the wrong way? About fifty of the “about 100 hostages still in Gaza” whom the media keep referring to are believed by the Israelis to have been murdered. Will we ever know what happened to each one?

The misery and fear shine through Ofir Engel’s harrowing account. The constant death threats, the letters the hostage had to write about their own impending deaths, the starvation diet consisting of two pieces of bread, one-fourth of a bottle of water, a single slice of cheese, and canned meat as their daily ration, Eden Yerushalmi, the girl who weighed 79 pounds when her body was returned, the insistence by their captors that the hostages not stand up but crawl to a bathroom, which for many of the hostages was not a room but only a bucket. Above all, there was the humiliation of being put on display for Gazan civilians, whom Hamas invited to laugh and jeer at these “Zionists” brought low, reminding us of the way that those same “innocent” civilians would hit and beat with sticks the Israelis lying half-naked on the back of flatbed trucks or across the handlebars of motorcycles, as they were first brought into Gaza on October 7. When those who are still being held are finally released — if they are not all murdered, as half of them, according to Israel, have already been — we will hear more such tales of cruelty, each more ghastly than the next.