Starved, abused, confined – SA media ignores hostages’ ordeal

“Hamas terrorists would tell hostages, ‘Nobody’s looking for you. Nobody cares. You’re going to stay here.’ They would even say to the women that they were going to be a great mother to their children. And some of the women hostages were forced to cook for the family that captured them, but couldn’t eat the food.”

These are the words of Israeli journalist Naama Kadosh, who met and interviewed many released hostages and hostage families. Kadosh, who works for i24, was recently in South Africa to meet South African Jewry and be interviewed by local media. She hoped to share what she had learned about the situation in Israel, especially what she had learned from the hostages.

She told the SA Jewish Report that most media outlets weren’t interested in interviewing her. One radio station made it clear that its standpoint was one-sided and definitely anti-Israel, so she didn’t go through with it.

“I understood that they’re blaming us basically for everything that’s going on. I’m willing to debate with whoever wants to hear what I have to say and I’m open-minded, but it feels to me that they have taken a stand against Israel mainly from a lack of knowledge.”

Kadosh said many media outlets didn’t fully understand what the hostages went and are still going through in captivity.

“Hamas held the hostages in cages with small amounts of light,” she said. “A lot of them at the beginning of the war were in cities in Gaza and houses. You must understand that not only Hamas took part in the attack, a lot of Gazan citizens also took part. They just got into the kibbutzim, grabbed whoever they could, and crossed the border with them.”

At the start of the war, she said, a lot of the Israelis were in citizens’ houses. But then when the army started to bomb the area, they moved a lot of the hostages underground.

Kadosh said that many hostages faced starvation in captivity, with them getting one piece of bread a day with maybe some vegetables, and very little water, often having only one bottle of water for three days.

She said many were held in tiny rooms, often one square metre in size, in which one could just sit and it wasn’t possible to do anything. “They would just sleep on chairs, or you would sleep on the ground. Some of them had to poop and pee on themselves because they didn’t have any type of bathroom there, and showered once every 40 days,” she said.

“The ladies were sexually abused while in captivity,” she said, “They faced a whole spectrum of abuse. I’m not even talking about what they did to the bodies. There was testimony of some terrorists burning them and branding them like cows with heated objects.”

From her experience, once the hostages are released and reunited with their families, they initially have a sense of euphoria. However, after a month or two, the reality of what they have been through and seen starts to hit them and they start to process what it is that they experienced – whether that be physical, sexual, or psychological abuse.

She described the hostage negotiations as being like a game of Russian Roulette. “You don’t know who’s going to come out. You want to know if you’re going to get a body or a live person. It’s very, very hard to negotiate like that. It’s like you speak in English, and they speak in Chinese. You’re not even speaking in terms of the same values.”

Kadosh said that while everyone was happy that the deal was happening and the hostages were being released, the families of those attacked by terrorists had many reservations.

“The cost of the ceasefire deal is high,” she said. “For every Israeli, if it’s a woman, 30 female terrorists are released from Israeli prisons. If it’s a man, 80 prisoners are released. And if it’s a soldier, you’re speaking about like 120 prisoners that are terrorists in Israeli prisons.”

Many Israelis are worried about the repercussions of releasing convicted terrorists from prison.

“A lot of these terrorists committed a terror attack inside of Israel and killed a lot of people,” said Kadosh, “So, of course, the families have mixed emotions about them being released after they killed their loved ones. But everybody understands that we must do everything to save one Israeli life. It’s worth everything we’ve got.”

Kadosh said Israeli nervousness about the release of the prisoners is based on the track record of the crimes past released prisoners have gone on to commit.

“We know that 99% of the prisoners that we’re going to release in these deals are probably going to try to do it again. It’s a risk we’re taking because the life of our hostages is more important than these prisoners.”

Though there is much debate in Israel about the deal, Israelis have come together over the past 15 and a half months to advocate for the hostages, mainly because it’s in the DNA of the Jewish people to be resilient, she said.

“The war helped us to understand that we have to be more united inside of Israel,” she said. “The war helped us to understand that our differences don’t matter. We have more similarities than the things that divide us.”