More ‘terrible’ details on treatment of hostages emerge
“One of the girls was given ketamine for a few weeks."
(AFP/THE TIMES OF ISRAEL) Hostages abducted into Gaza during Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel were drugged to keep them docile in captivity and subjected to psychological and sexual abuse, a specialist says.
“I’ve never seen anything like that” in 20 years of treating trauma victims, says Renana Eitan, director of the psychiatric division of Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Medical Centre.
“The physical, the sexual, the mental, the psychological abuse of these hostages that came back is just terrible,” she adds. “We have to rewrite the textbook.”
The centre has received 14 ex-hostages released by Hamas, some of whom reported being drugged, including with what doctors believe were benzodiazapines, a class of depressants with a sedative effect that includes drugs like Valium.
“They wanted to control the kids, and sometimes it’s difficult to control young children, adolescents. And they know that if they drug them they will be quiet,” she adds.
“One of the girls was given ketamine for a few weeks,” she continues, referring to a powerful dissociative anesthetic known for giving the recipient a sense of detachment from their environment. “It’s unbelievable to do this to a child.”
Eitan says one patient said she and others were held in total darkness for more than four days. “They became psychotic, they had hallucinations,” Eitan says.
There are also reports of self-harm among hostages in captivity, she notes, while some returnees have since professed to having suicidal thoughts.
“But this is our mission, to make sure that such things will not happen,” she added.
There have been multiple accounts of rape and sexual assault by Palestinian terrorists on October 7, and a doctor who treated some of the hostages released by Hamas said at least 10 of them — both men and women — were sexually assaulted or abused while in captivity.
Chen Goldstein-Almog, who was freed during the truce, on Monday told the Kan public broadcaster that she met three hostages who told her they were sexually assaulted by their captors, and heard a similar story about a fourth.
“We heard three stories first-hand, and another story that was told to us,” Goldstein-Almog said. “Things that happened a few weeks after they arrived in Gaza. They are physically injured.”
“With the way they sexually assaulted them and desecrated their bodies, they don’t know how they will cope,” she added. “If they had been released earlier, they would have been spared. We also saw a guy who was beaten.”
“Everything must be done to get them out.”
On Saturday evening, a few thousand Israelis gathered in what has come to be known as Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, where they viewed harrowing clips of released hostages revealing horrific details from their time in the Gaza.
Margalit Mozes, 77, who was kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz, said in her video that a terrorist took her oxygen concentrator machine, which she needs to sleep, despite her explaining to him in Arabic, “This is my oxygen.”
In her video, Adina Moshe, 72, said that good friends of hers from Kibbutz Nir Oz remain in Gaza, all of them elderly, sick, and without adequate medications.
“When I was there, the food situation there deteriorated. We eventually reached the point of only eating rice,” she said, pleading for Israel to do everything to secure the remaining hostages’ release. Until that happens, she said, “I won’t be able to recover.”
At least 38 people from Nir Oz were murdered on October 7, and 75 abducted.
A video from siblings Maya (21) and Itay (18) Regev showed them saying that every day in captivity “is like hell — intense fear, zero sleep, the lack of knowledge is simply scary.”
They said each day there was “like eternity” and that they missed their family and suffered from hunger and difficult conditions.
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