Family Members: Hostages Ate Poorly, Slept on Benches; Waited up to Two Hours for Bathroom

Family members of released Israeli hostages told reporters Sunday that the hostages had been forced to sleep on benches during their seven-week captivity; that they had to endure waits of up to two hours for the bathroom; and that they were sometimes denied food.

Adva Adar, granddaughter of freed Holocaust survivor Yaffa Adar, 85; and Merav Mor Raviv, cousin of Keren Munder, 54, spoke to reporters in a press conference organized by MediaCentral Jerusalem.

Coming Home: Adva Adar, Granddaughter of Released Hostage Yaffa Adar, in First Online Up from MediaCentral on Vimeo.

Adar said that her grandmother had counted the days of her captivity, and that she had lost weight during her time as a hostage.

Raviv added:

They were eating, but not regularly, and not all the time. Keren told me that there were days that they didn’t get food, only pita bread or things like that. They lost — Keren and her mom, Ruthie, lost, each one of them, around, between six to eight kilos, and they are not that tall. They ate a lot of rice and bread …. I know that she told me that when they wanted to go to the bathroom, how they had to knock on the door, and sometimes, and then they were waiting [for] it to be opened, and sometimes they were waiting one and-a-half hours, or two hours, to go to the bathroom. And they told me that they were sleeping on [a] kind of benches in a reception room, that you have three chairs combined as a bench, they had to sleep on that kind of, to spend their night on the bench.

Raviv added that the hostages looked as if they had lost weight, even though most were said to be in good physical condition.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.