A Thai hostage who was freed by Hamas has told Israel’s Channel 12 that the Jewish hostages who were held with him were beaten with electric cables, and that all hostages were denied adequate food.
The Times of Israel reported Wednesday:
He says there was little to eat for the hostages — a pita a day, sometimes a tin of tuna to share between four, and sometimes a piece of cheese. Held for more than seven weeks, he says they were allowed to shower once.
“We were with Israelis, and they were guarded all the time,” he is quoted saying. “The Jews who were held with me were treated very harshly, sometimes they were beaten with electric cables.”
Channel 12’s report (in Hebrew) noted that the freed Thai hostage said that Jewish hostages were kept in worse conditions than others.
The new report is just the latest account of torture experienced by the hostages. As Breitbart News has reported, Hamas tortured children by forcing them at gunpoint to watch films of atrocities against Israeli civilians on October 7. It also kept some children alone for weeks, and denied adequate food, water, and sunlight to hostages generally.
Though some said they were treated well after initial beatings, and many were well enough to be released from the hospital shortly after they were transferred to Israel, many lost weight, and many of the children have shown signs of psychological trauma.
The Red Cross has not visited the hostages, nor has it transferred medicines and other needed items to them, in nearly eight weeks of captivity.
Hamas took roughly 240 hostages on October 7, in the course of murdering about 1,200 people and wounding thousands more. It has freed roughly 70, almost all of whom are women and children, in exchange for triple that number of Palestinian terror convicts, also female or juvenile. It has also freed over a dozen foreign nationals, including 19 Thais, who were kidnapped October 7. Many more foreign nationals still remain in Hamas custody.
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.