Israeli Hostages Return Gaunt And Skeletal
Feb 9, 2025 4:00 pm By Hugh Fitzgerald
During their release, the Israeli hostages have been made to suffer various indignities. Some of the girls and women, obviously frightened, have been surrounded by rifle-toting bezonians, pressing against them, screaming at them, pushing and pulling them this way and that, making it difficult for them, even with their Hamas guards, to make it to the Red Cross officials who were waiting to receive them.
Some of the hostages have been paraded on stages in front of Allahu-akbaring Hamas men. Some have been forced to sign documents expressing their “appreciation” for the “good treatment” they received from Hamas. All of them have apparently been told by their captors to smile for the cameras; some of the girls and women being released were ordered not just to smile, but to engage in joking banter with their guards, for if they did not, Hamas would take it out on those those Israelis still in captivity.
Three of the captives released — Doron Seinbrecher, Emily Damari, and Romi Gonen — were videotaped as they were handed “gift bags,” brown paper bags, really, that were said to contain mementos from their time held in captivity in Gaza. On each bag was the logo of the Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas. In each of the bags, there was a special certificate, also bearing the logo of the Al-Qassam brigades, titled “Release Agreement” in both Hebrew and Arabic, with Israeli media reporting that the document was signed by the Red Cross at the moment of handover.
God knows what Hamas hoped to achieve with that little farce. Israeli media has reported that those “gift bags” also contained photos of the hostages while they were in captivity, a map of the Gaza Strip, and Palestinian flag necklaces. How thoughtful. A keepsake, to remind those Israeli guests of Hamas’ hospitality. Ah, those blue remembered hills, those days of lost content, and those happy tunnels where I lay, and cannot come again. Who says Hamas doesn’t have a heart?
“We swore ‘never again,’ yet Israeli hostages return skeletal and tortured – comment,” by Zvika Klein, Jerusalem Post, February 8, 2025:
The faces are haunting: Or Levy, Eli Sharabi, and Ohad Ben Ami. Gaunt and hollow, their bodies frail, tell the story of 491 days in Hamas captivity. Sunken eyes, protruding bones, and skeletal frames ring an instant bell for Israelis and Jews everywhere: survivors of the Holocaust, the Muselmann of the concentration camps, and those who starved to the brink of death.
But when these hostages came home precisely 80 years after the fall of the Nazi regime, the world’s response was unimaginably detached.
The BBC, ever selective in its moral outrage, conveniently omitted their suffering from its homepage. CNN, on the other hand, saw fit to highlight the “emaciated” condition of Palestinian prisoners released in exchange-prisoners who, it must be said, received three meals a day, medical care, and family visits. The comparison is not only absurd; it is obscene.
Not one of the released Palestinians who have been released exhibited the “emaciated” condition that Hamas now claims. It simply makes up its lies, throws them out to the world media, which dutifully disseminates them without any semblance of investigation. I have repeatedly viewed the scenes of those released prisoners sticking their heads out of buses; all appear well-fed; not a single one whom I saw could be described as “emaciated.” They were provided with three meals a day, after all, food with the same nutritional value as what the soldiers of the IDF receive.
Many of the Israel hostages lived underground in dark, dank tunnels for months at a time. Quite a few were subject to sexual molestation, including repeated rapes of both female and male hostages. They were fed starvation diets. Some of them report being given one-half of a piece of pita as a day’s ration. Their wounds were not treated. They were beaten according to the whim of their guards. Only after all of the Israeli hostages, both the living and those murdered by Hamas while in captivity (Hamas will claim they were all killed in Israeli airstrikes), are returned, will it be possible for the full and terrible stories of their captivities to be told. And they must be. |
