Israeli hostages were forced by their Palestinian captors to recite the Quran and Islamic prayers every day, according to one of the hostages freed in a daring raid on Saturday.
Though the four hostages who were rescued — Noa Argamani, 25; Almog Meir Jan, 21; Andrey Kozlov, 27; and Shlomi Ziv, 40 — appeared to be healthy when arriving in Israel, doctors said that they had been malnourished and that their muscles were near atrophy from lack of use.
Moreover, the hostages — who were often guarded by civilians aligned with Hamas — had been beaten regularly and suffered other forms of physical and psychological torture. They were also forced to perform Islamic rituals.
The Times of Israel noted:
The four hostages who were rescued on Saturday from Gaza are in a worse physical and psychological state than initially believed, according to Hebrew media reports on Sunday.
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The rescued hostages have begun to talk about their experiences, according to various reports.
Channel 13 reported on Sunday that Ziv said he had learned Arabic from Al-Jazeera broadcasts he watched in captivity and that their captors made them read the Quran and pray every day.
The Wall Street Journal reported:
Their captors doled out punishments if the captives didn’t follow their strict rules, including locking them in the bathroom and piling blankets on them during hot weather. They repeatedly threatened to kill them.
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[A] doctor who has been treating groups of rescued or released hostages since Oct. 7 said that despite the initial positive assessments based on their cheerful demeanor on TV, they had endured “physical and mental torture.”
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Israeli security forces and the hostages identified Palestinian journalist Abdullah Aljamal, who lived in the apartment, as one of their captors. Abdullah and his father Ahmad Aljamal—a doctor and imam at a local mosque that is run by Hamas—were both killed during the operation. Their neighbors said they always knew that Abdullah Aljamal was affiliated with Hamas.
One of the hostages, Noa Argamani, reported being forced to clean a Palestinian family’s kitchen, in effect performing slave labor.
Pro-Palestinian sources have seized on a detail reported by hostage Almog Meir Jan, who said that his captors made him a birthday cake. He said, however, that it was done as a “cynical” gesture — which pro-Palestinian media omit.
The hostages were denied protein for months, and often were given only a fraction of what their captors had to eat.
The Jerusalem Post reported:
Mittal Binyamin, a clinical nutritionist at the Sheba Hospital in Tel Hashomer who received and treated them, explained in an interview with Walla why appearances hide malnutrition and serious deficiencies due to the difficult conditions they experienced.
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“What may appear to be a normal state of a person who is not starving is only because of the extra fat. But professionals see them without clothes, check them, and see that the situation is different.”
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Andrey Kozlov’s parents, for example, said that he tried to train in captivity. “Perhaps it was good for the mind, but no muscle could be built because of the lack of protein. Everyone came back severely malnourished according to all categories. The consequences of this could be damage to internal organs; it is likely that if it had lasted longer, we would have seen more injuries, for example, in the heart muscle and neurologically speaking.”
116 Israeli hostages are still thought to be in captivity in Gaza, with 41 of them believed to be dead.
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 recent e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the 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.
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