More And More

As predicted, the stories of the recently released hostages are painting a picture of how detestably they were treated in a report from WND.com:

Details of the appalling conditions in which the released female IDF spotters were kept began to emerge Tuesday, as the military permitted a slow drip of certain information relating to their treatment at the hands of their kidnappers.

These brave women are talking about their time as hostages privately. They were obviously affected by all these experiences:

Since their release on Saturday, the IDF spotters have apparently been telling their families in some detail about their ordeal, out of a sense they need to express their experiences with their loved ones to help them process. It is said they were aware of the magnitude of Oct. 7, because they witnessed the scale of the attack and were abducted relatively late on. They acknowledged their being in the shelter and watching friends be murdered and slowly dying had a profound effect on them.

The deputy chief of the Israeli military's medical corps, Col. Dr. Avi Banov didn’t talk about if they were tortured or abused out of respect for the women, but a video on social media did talk about the crudeness of their captors:

Banov said out of respect for the hostages' privacy he would not discuss whether any of the seven former captives released within the last 10 days or so bore any signs of torture or abuse. There was particular concern for the female soldiers as at the time of their capture, the terrorists who abducted them were heard to say, "these are the ones who can get pregnant."

In a post on X we actually see footage the families of the released hostages approved that clearly show how brutally these women were treated. Unfortunately these small comments hardly tell us the whole story that will most definitely scar these hostage’s lives.

They Fought Back

But at least some of the stories show how these captives helped each other as we’re told from an article from i24news.tv:

In a poignant interview that aired Tuesday night on Channel 12's "Uvda" show, Amit Soussana, who was released during the first hostage exchange with Hamas in November 2023, delivered a moving testimony about her captivity, revealing previously unknown details of her ordeal.

Soussana was not going to quietly obey her captors and paid a price for it:

From the moment of her abduction, during which she strongly resisted the terrorists, the 41-year-old Israeli woman suffered severe physical violence. "They split my lip, broke my nose and eye socket," she recounts, before adding: "I didn't feel any pain. I just remember thinking to myself: 'They're going to kill me, so at least I won't go down without a fight.'"

She is the only woman to describe the physical assaults she endured:

Her testimony reveals inhumane detention conditions. "It is dark in Gaza, you open your eyes and think they are still closed," she described. Permanently tied up, she had to ask for permission for the most basic needs. She also spoke again about the sexual assaults she had been subjected to. Amit Soussana is to this day the only hostage to have publicly reported this type of violence during her captivity.

While I can’t confirm it, I’m sure that the other female hostages were treated like Soussana at one point or another. She was mistakenly thought to be an Israeli soldier and was subjected to brutal treatment until a recently released hostage intervened:

After three weeks, her transfer to another terrorist group marked the beginning of a new phase of torment. Wrongly suspected of being a senior officer of the Israel Defense Forces, she underwent brutal interrogations. "They tied me up like a roast chicken, head down, with tape on my face," she detailed.

It was the intervention of another hostage, Liri Albag, which put an end to this ordeal. "Liri is something special, she has an incredible strength," emphasized Amit, who claims that the young soldier, who was also just released by Hamas, had "saved her life."

Albag, according a report from The Jerusalem Post saw what was happening and spoke up:

According to Soussana, the terrorists said to her: “You have 40 minutes to tell the truth, or we will kill you.”

At this point, Albag pulled their captors aside and successfully convinced them that Soussana was not a soldier, much less a senior official, as they had believed.

The abductors backed down.

Soussana spoke to Albag after she was released:

“Liri is something special,” Soussana said. “She is a force to be reckoned with. I told her when she came back: ‘I don’t know if they would have killed me or not, but as far as I’m concerned, you saved my life.’”

The article noted that her account gives us insight to how all the Israeli soldiers were treated. These terrorists are not nice people at all. Why people protest on their behalf is beyond me. Do they not read these accounts? Are they blind to the violence and total depravity of their actions? Well, as long as I have a platform, I’ll tell anyone willing to listen that Hamas cannot for one second be allowed to rule anywhere. They’ve lost the moral high ground if they ever had it. These are animals of the lowest kind and deserve to be treated as such. They may not realize it, but Israelis are forgiving people. But any people have their limits. Regardless of any truce, their time is coming. I pray it is sooner than later because I certainly don’t want the remaining hostages to withstand this any longer.