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Key Points
- Medical professionals treating hostages note conditions of solitary confinement, limited light exposure, and poor meals.
- Israel and Hamas have agreed to extend their ceasefire by two days.
- Relatives demand the Israeli government ensure the freedom of all hostages.
Poor nutrition, solitary confinement — details of how the hostages seized when Hamas attacked southern Israel have been treated in captivity are starting to emerge from under a veil of secrecy.
Hamas has freed 12 more hostages, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said on Tuesday, the fifth day of agreed between the militant Palestinian group and Israel in the Gaza war.
Israel’s military confirmed that all 12 — comprising 10 Israeli citizens and two foreign nationals — were now with its special forces on Israeli territory.
Israel said it freed 30 Palestinian detainees from Ofer and a detention centre in Jerusalem. Earlier it said they would be 15 women and 15 teenage males, according to the Palestinian Prisoner’s Club, a semi-official organisation.
Al Jazeera said the Palestinians had arrived in the West Bank city of Ramallah and Jerusalem.
A spokesman for the foreign ministry of Qatar, which is mediating in the conflict, said the freed Israeli hostages included nine women and one minor.
According to Israeli tallies, Hamas fighters killed 1,200 people and seized about 240 hostages when they burst across the border fence into southern Israel on 7 October.
In response to that attack, Israel has vowed to destroy the Hamas militants who run Gaza, raining bombs and shells on the enclave and launching a ground offensive in the north.
To date, some 15,000 people, roughly 40 per cent of them children, have been killed, Palestinian health authorities said.
The total number of hostages released by Hamas since the start of the truce last Friday now stands at 81, including 60 Israelis – all women and children – and 21 foreign nationals, many of them Thai farm workers.
Israel had released 150 prisoners prior to Tuesday’s moves.
None of the hostages released under the truce have so far given any direct accounts of the conditions in which they were held.
Hospitals claim they’ve been directed to refrain from disclosing details about the conditions, fearing potential harm to those still in captivity
But some details are slowly surfacing from medical professionals treating them, while relatives — often demanding that the Israeli government ensure all the hostages are freed — are offering more dramatic accounts of mistreatment and hardship.
Ronit Zaidenstein, head of the medical team at Shamir Medical Centre where 17 released Thai nationals were treated, said they had been fed “very unnutritious food” in captivity.
“The people who came to us lost a significant amount of their body weight in such a short time, 10 per cent or more.”
In an interview that, according to AFP, has since been taken offline, Margarita Mashavi, a doctor at Wolfson Medical Centre, one of the main facilities caring for freed hostages, said those she spoke to described being kept several stories underground.
“They didn’t give them light. They gave it to them for only two hours,” she was quoted as saying by the Ynet news site on Monday.
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‘Very withdrawn’
One patient said her meals consisted of “rice, canned hummus and fava beans, and sometimes salted cheese with pita, but not more than that. No fruit, no vegetables, no eggs,” she said.
Food supplies have run short in the Palestinian territory during the war, and the World Food Programme has warned of “widespread hunger”.
“Even when they asked for a pencil or pen to write in order to pass the time, the Hamas men didn’t allow it because they were afraid they would transmit information in writing, so they were without television or reading and therefore passed the time only in conversation with one another,” Mashavi said.
She referred an AFP interview request to her employers, who declined.
Esther Yaeli, the grandmother of 12-year-old French-Israeli boy Eitan Yahalomi, who was released on Monday, told the Walla news website he was held in solitary confinement for 16 days.
“The days that he was alone were horrible,” she said.
“Now Eitan appears very withdrawn.”
“The noises of the bombs hurt him, his ears hurt for a very long time,” Yaeli said he told her.
The returned hostages have arrived after nightfall, and are immediately assessed to determine if any need urgent medical care.
Two of the freed hostages have been hospitalised after their release, including 84-year-old Elma Avraham, who was treated in intensive care but whose condition doctors said on Tuesday had improved.
Hagar Mizrahi, the head of the Israeli health ministry’s operations for returning hostages, told AFP that they had been held in “horrible conditions” and that “the medical consequences are pretty clear”.
She declined to elaborate, citing patient privacy concerns.
“Some of the things that I’ve heard in recent days are heart-wrenching,” she added, offering no specifics.
“They’re simply outrageous in every way.”
Hamas is a Palestinian military and political group, which has gained power in the Gaza Strip since winning legislative elections there in 2006. Its stated aim is to establish a Palestinian state, while refusing to recognise Israel’s right to exist.
Hamas, in its entirety, is designated as a terrorist organisation by countries including Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. New Zealand and Paraguay list only its military wing as a terrorist group.
In 2018, the United Nations General Assembly voted against a resolution condemning Hamas in its entirety as a terrorist organisation.
