Some of the people who held Israelis in captivity were “not soldiers” but civilian Palestinian teachers and doctors, former Israeli hostage Tal Shoham revealed Monday.
“One of the guards was a first-grade teacher, another was a lecturer at a university, and another was a doctor. These are normal people becoming terrorists,” Shoham, who was kidnapped with his family during Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, told reporters hours before Hamas handed over all 20 remaining Israeli hostages, according to the Times of Israel.
Shoham described his Hamas captors as “so brainwashed and full of hate” and said that his 505 days in captivity included “a lot of torture and cruelty.” While Hamas released Shoham’s wife and two children in November 2023, it held him until this February, when it released him as part of a hostage-prisoner exchange.
Hamas has long blurred the line between combatant and civilian. Ordinary Gazans helped Hamas carry out its Oct. 7, 2023, attack, the Washington Free Beacon reported that month. Whereas Hamas members wore uniforms and carried military-grade weapons, Gazan sympathizers who followed them into the Jewish state were dressed as civilians and mostly unarmed. The civilians created a “second wave of carnage” that rivaled that of the Hamas terrorists, the Free Beacon reported.
Other former Israeli hostages have also confirmed that ordinary Gazans were “deeply complicit” in Hamas’s hostage-taking on October 7, the Free Beacon reported in January 2024.
“Unarmed teens helped to abduct Jews from their homes on Oct. 7, while Gazan women and children held some of the Israelis captive,” according to the Free Beacon‘s report. “In other cases, Gazan doctors collaborated with Hamas terrorists to covertly treat kidnapped Israelis and imprison them in hospitals.”
Hamas terrorists also routinely stole humanitarian aid meant for Gazan civilians, Shoham revealed Monday. “I saw with my own eyes that they stole boxes and boxes and boxes of humanitarian aid from Egypt, from Turkey, from the Emirates, but they didn’t agree to give us any of this food in the tunnels,” he said.
Israel and Hamas last week agreed to stop fighting under President Donald Trump’s peace deal, with Hamas on Monday freeing all 20 living Israeli hostages and Israel releasing nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees in return. World leaders have praised Trump for brokering the agreement, calling it a rare diplomatic breakthrough in the region.
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