The Israeli hostages who were rescued at the weekend were beaten while in Hamas captivity and left malnourished by a lack of food, the doctor in charge of their treatment has revealed.
“It was a harsh, harsh, experience, with a lot of abuse, almost every day,” Dr Itai Pessach told CNN at the Sheba Medical Centre in Ramat Gan outside Tel Aviv. “Every hour, both physical, mental, and other types, and that is something that is beyond comprehension.”
Noa Argamani, 26, Almog Meir Jan, 22, Andrey Kozlov and Shlomi Ziv, 41, were all kidnapped from the Nova music festival in southern Israel on Oct 7 and taken to Gaza.
According to Dr Pessach, the hostages were moved on several occasions and kept under the watch of different guards. The supply of food and water was unstable and there were periods where they got almost no food at all.
“They had no protein, so their muscles are extremely wasted, there is damage to some other systems because of that,” he said.