The parents of four young women’s hostages released from Hamas’s captivity in Gaza told the BBC that their daughters were abused, including armed men starving, intimidated and threatening and forced to cook and clean them.
They said hostages held in underground tunnels and buildings, witnesses to physical abuse and were made to participate in Hamas’s propaganda videos, including, in one case, by lying their own death.
They said women found strength through sharing stories, drawing and maintaining a diary.
None of the women interviewed the media from releasing freedom, and parents say that details of what they endured were still coming out. There are also things I can’t talk about because of fears that hostages still put in a gauze in danger.
Three of the four women whose parents spoke with the BBC were female soldiers that Hamas abducted from the Nahal Oz Army near Gaza on October 7, 2023.
Access to hostages feeds and their treatment by men’s guards have varied over the 15 months that have been held, their parents said. They were moved between locations, rarely seeing sunlight.
“It was very different between the places that went – it could be a good tunnel, it could be a very bad tunnel. It could be a good house or a bad house,” said Father Agam Berger, 20) a soldier who was a soldier who was in Nahal oz.
Some places had good food, some had “very bad food … They just tried to survive,” said Shlomi Berger.
“They [and their captors] They had to escape from one place to another because they were there in the war zone. It was very dangerous to be there, “said Orly Gilboa, whose daughter Daniella was also abducted from the base.
When Daniella was watching Release of three men’s hostage last week “Who came out lean and tortured,” she said to his mother, “If I had been released two months ago, I would probably look like them.”
“She announced, she lost a lot of weight through captivity. But in the last two months, they got a lot of food to gain weight,” says Mrs. Gilbo.
Other parents also reported a significant weight loss. The daughter of Merarava Leshem Gonen took Hamas from the new music festival.
Roma, 24, was released in the first week of trial in January – she lost “20% of her body weight,” her mother says.
Mrs. Gilbo says that the hardest thing she endured was to see a video suggesting that her daughter had been killed. Her kidnappers poured her powder so she looked like she was covered with plaster, as if she had been killed in an Israeli military blow.
“I think everyone who saw him believed him, but I just told himself that it couldn’t be,” she told the BBC.
The war was initiated by Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, when armed people killed about 1,200 people and took another 251 hostages.
Since then, more than 48,230 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the Territorial Ministry of Health. About two -thirds of Gaza buildings are destroyed or damaged, the UN estimates.
So far, 16 Israeli and five Thai hostages have been replaced by more than 600 Palestinian prisoners, held in Israel in accordance with the trial agreement that began on January 19.
Mr. Berger says his daughter Agam was threatened by her abductors and witnessed physical abuse while in captivity.
“Sometimes they tortured other women’s hostages before her eyes,” he says, especially referring to the attack on Amit Sounsan, a former hostage released in November 2023.
Mr. Berger says his daughter told him armed men kept watching them: “playing with their rifles and hand grenades all the time.”
He says that men’s abductors treated women with “great disrespect”, including forcing to clean and prepare food.
“That really bothered. She’s a girl who, if she has something to say, will say it. She’s not shy. And sometimes she told them what she thinks of them and their behavior,” he says.
He adds that agam in a small act of resistance refused to do any work on Saturday, the Jewish rest day. The men detained her accepted it.
They were also not allowed to speak out loud.
“When Agam came [back to Israel] She wanted to speak all the time … After one day she had no voice because she spoke so much, “says Mr. Berger.
Yoni Levy, whose daughter Naama, was also taken from the army of the base for 20 years, says she was sometimes held at the locations where she played a TV or radio.
Once Naama, he saw his father talking on TV. “It gave her a lot of hope and optimism … that no one would forget her, and we will do everything we need to get her out of this hell.”
He says he was “much more traumatic than captivity for the Hamas Army.”
“That can change, but at this stage we think this is the most tragic day she talked about,” says Mr. Levy.
The recordings of Naama that day show her and other soldiers in blood clothing surrounded by armed men in the base of the base before being forced to a vehicle and take them to Gaza.
Three soldiers whose parents spoke with the BBC were among the five from the almighty unarmed military unit in Nahal Oz Freedom in the first round of tribute.
The members of the unit, in the Hebrew language, as a Tatzpitaniyot, are in charge of watching the border of Gaza and looking for signs of anything suspicious. The survivors and relatives of some of those who were killed that day say they warned for months that Hamas had been preparing to attack.
A few days before October 7, Daniella was at home on a break from the service. Then she said to her mother, “Mom, when I go back to the army, there will be war.”
“I didn’t think it would be such a war and, of course, that my daughter would take hostages,” Mrs. Gilbo says.
Mrs. Gilbo and the family of two other observers who spoke with the BBC say they join calls for investigation into what happened.
They say their daughters remain concerned about the conditions of those who are still in Gaza and have invited the truce to continue.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Leshem Gonen says he still learns what happened to Roma’s daughter.
She was filmed at a new music festival, and her mother says she was not treated properly, leaving her with a “open wound where she could see the bone.”
“It’s something we can know and tell her. Other things, I think it will take time.”
Mrs. Leshem Gonen says that Roma described her release in the first week of tribute as “scary” and “scary”. She was surrounded by armed and crowds. But the moment of their reunion was “so powerful.”
Parents also described how their daughters found ways to pass every day in captivity – drawing, making notes or sharing stories with each other.
“They wrote as far as they could, every day – what was happening, where they were moving, what were the guards and such things,” says Mr. Berger.
While in captivity, young women dreamed of things they wanted to do when they returned home: getting hairstyles and dishes sushi.
Daniella drew a butterfly with the word “freedom” while she was in captivity – she is now tattooed on her hand.
They adapt to life in Israel, and their families say they walk step by step.
The moment of reuniting with his daughter Naama is still blur, Mr. Levy says, but he remembers emotion.
“The feeling that I will take care of you now and everything will be fine. Dad is here. That’s all. And then everything was quiet.”
Additional Reporting Naomi Scherbel-Lopt
