Parents of four young female Israeli hostages freed from Hamas captivity in Gaza have told the BBC about how their daughters were abused, including being starved, intimidated and threatened by armed men, and being forced to cook and clean.
They recounted how the hostages were held in underground tunnels and buildings, witnessed physical abuse and were made to participate in Hamas propaganda videos, including, in one case, by faking her own death.
They said the women found strength through sharing stories, drawing and keeping a diary.
None of the women have given interviews to the media since their release, and their parents say the full details of what they endured are still emerging. There are also things they can’t speak about due to fears it could put the hostages still in Gaza at risk.
Three of the four women whose parents spoke to the BBC were female soldiers kidnapped by Hamas from the Nahal Oz army base near Gaza on 7 October 2023.
The hostages’ access to food and their treatment by male guards varied over the 15 months they were held, their parents said. They were moved between locations, rarely seeing sunlight.
“It was very different between the places that she 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 the father of Agam Berger, 20, a soldier who had been at Nahal Oz.
Some of the places had good food, some had “very bad food… they just tried to survive,” Shlomi Berger said.
(L-R) Five female hostages Naama Levy, Karina Ariev, Agam Berger, Liri Albag and Daniella Gilboa were released last month [Reuters]
“They [and their captors] had to run away from one place to another because they are in a war zone there. It was very dangerous to be there,” said Orly Gilboa, whose daughter Daniella was also kidnapped from the base.
When Daniella watched the release of three male hostages last week – who came out thin and emaciated – she told her mother: “If I had been released two months ago I would have probably looked like them.”
“She got thinner, she lost a lot of her weight through the captivity. But in the last two months they were given a lot of food to gain weight,” Ms Gilboa says.
Other parents have also reported significant weight loss. Meirav Leshem Gonen’s daughter was taken by Hamas from the Nova music festival.
Romi, 24, was released in the first week of the ceasefire in January – she had lost “20% of her body weight”, says her mother.
Ms Gilboa says the hardest thing she endured was seeing a video that suggested her daughter had been killed. Her captors poured powder on her so she looked like she was covered in plaster, as if she was killed in an Israeli military strike.
“I think everyone who saw it believed it, but I just kept telling myself that it can’t be,” she told the BBC.
Agam Berger was reunited with her family at an Israeli facility on 30 January [GPO/Reuters]
The war was triggered by Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, when gunmen killed about 1,200 people and took another 251 hostage.
More than 48,230 people have been killed in Gaza since, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry. About two-thirds of Gaza’s buildings have been destroyed or damaged, estimates the UN.
So far, 16 Israeli and five Thai hostages have been exchanged for more than 600 Palestinian prisoners held in Israel under the ceasefire deal that began on 19 January.
Mr Berger says his daughter, Agam, was threatened by her captors and witnessed physical abuse while in captivity.
“Sometimes they tortured other female hostages in front of her eyes,” he says, referring specifically to an assault on Amit Soussana, a former hostage who was released in November 2023.
Mr Berger says his daughter told him how they were constantly watched over by armed men, “playing all the time with their guns and their hand grenades”.
He says the male captors treated the women with “big disrespect”, including forcing them to clean and prepare food.
“That was really bothering her. She’s a girl that if she has something to say, she’ll say it. She’s not shy. And sometimes she told them what she was thinking about them and their behaviour,” he says.
He adds that in a small act of resistance, Agam had refused to perform any jobs on the Sabbath, the Jewish day of rest. The men detaining her accepted this.
They were also not allowed to speak loudly.
“When Agam came [back to Israel] she wanted to speak all the time… After a day, she had no voice because she’d spoken so much,” Mr Berger says.
Yoni Levy, whose daughter Naama, 20, was also taken from the army base, says she was sometimes held in locations where there was a TV or radio playing.
Once, Naama saw her father talking on TV. “It gave her a lot of hope and optimism… that nobody would forget her, and we’ll do whatever is needed to take her out of this hell.”
The Levy family reunited in Israel in late January [GPO]
He says for Naama, the Hamas attack on the army base was “was much more traumatic than the captivity itself”.
“It may change but at this stage we think that this is the most tragic day that she’s talked about,” Mr Levy says.
Footage of Naama that day shows her and other female soldiers in bloodstained clothing surrounded by armed men in a room at the base before being forced into a vehicle and taken to Gaza.
The three female soldiers whose parents spoke to the BBC are among five from an all-women unarmed military unit at Nahal Oz freed in the first round of the ceasefire.
Members of the unit, known in Hebrew as Tatzpitaniyot, are tasked with observing the Gaza border and looking for signs of anything suspicious. Survivors and relatives of some of those killed that day say that they had been warning for months that Hamas had been preparing for an attack.
A few days before the 7 October attack, Daniella had been at home on a break from service. She had told her mother then: “Mummy, when I go back to the army, there’s going to be a war.”
“I didn’t think it was going to be such a war and of course that my daughter would be taken hostage,” Ms Gilboa says.
Ms Gilboa and the families of the two other observers who spoke to the BBC say they are joining calls for an inquiry into what happened.
They say their daughters remain concerned about the conditions of those still in Gaza and have called for the ceasefire to continue.
Daniella Gilboa returned home on 5 February [Reuters]
Meanwhile, Ms Leshem Gonen says she is still learning what happened to her daughter Romi.
She was shot at the Nova music festival and her mother says she was not properly treated, leaving her with “an open wound where she could see the bone”.
“This is something we can know and that she speaks about. The other things, I think it will take time.”
Ms Leshem Gonen says Romi described her release in the first week of the truce as “intimidating” and “frightening”. She was surrounded by gunmen and crowds. But the moment of their reunion was “so powerful”.
Romi Gonen stepping out into freedom [Reuters]
The parents also described how their daughters had found ways to get through each day in captivity – through drawing, making notes or sharing stories with each other.
“They wrote as much as they could, every day – what was happening, where were they moving, who were the guards and things like that,” says Mr Berger.
While in captivity, the young women had dreamt about the things they wanted to do when they got home: getting a haircut and eating sushi.
Daniella had drawn a butterfly with the word “freedom” while in captivity – she now has that tattooed on her arm.
They are adapting to life back in Israel, and their families say they are taking the recovery step by step.
The moment of reunion with his daughter Naama is still a blur, says Mr Levy, but he remembers the emotion.
“The feeling was that… I will take care of you now, and everything’s going to be OK. Daddy’s here. That’s all. And then everything was quiet.”
Additional reporting by Naomi Scherbel-Ball
Naama Levy, in her parents’ arms again [Reuters]
