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Whatever joy the free world felt at the release of Ohad Ben Ami, Eli Sharabi, and Or Levy on Saturday was almost immediately replaced by a quiet and collective horror. The world watched, in shock, as three gaunt, once-healthy men were paraded around a Gaza stage, humiliated. To the ones who knew them best, they were almost unrecognisable — hollow versions of the fathers and husbands whose 491-day nightmare had finally come to an end. “I hugged him,” Or’s brother said solemnly. “But he wasn’t the same.”

The anguish of captivity was etched across their faces, their hollow cheekbones — a story of torture, starvation, and fear. They were hung by their feet for hours at a time, tied with rope or bound, sometimes gagged, strangled, or even burned. After long stretches of days without food or water, they would have rotten pita bread to eat. “We were treated like animals,” one hostage said blankly.

If you were lucky, you were kept above ground — in people’s apartments, where there were windows, sunlight, and room to pace. The less fortunate, like these three, were forced to live in almost complete darkness, suffocating in the humidity of the tunnels and malnourished. Most have gone months without showers or medical care. And as time has gone on, their captors have become more brutal, the freed hostages warn — more aggressive.

“There was a point when we barely had any food at all,” one of the women told her family last month. She remembers all of them sitting around a single plate of rice, trying to divide it equally “to the last grain.” “You find yourself counting,” she thinks back. “Such hunger can’t be explained.”

Eighty-year-old Gadi Mozes paced six miles a day in his two-and-a-half square yard cell, counting the tiles on the floor to measure steps and doing math problems to stay alert. But down below, Or Levy had lost the ability to even stand. “I was bound in chains. Toward the release,” he explained, he was given more food and “learned to walk.”

Bittersweet Reunions

The worst, for many of the freed hostages, is coming home to find that their loved ones — the people whose faces they clung to in their worst hours — didn’t survive. On what should have been his happiest day, Saturday, Levy discovered that his wife had been killed. “For 491 days, he held on to the hope that he would return to her,” his brother said emotionally. “For 491 days, he didn’t know she was no longer alive.”

For the families still desperately awaiting word of the more than 70 innocents still held by Hamas, the picture grows increasingly bleak. Idit Ohel, whose son Alon Ohel turned 24 this month, heard from Israeli officials that he’s been tortured and left to suffer with multiple untreated injuries. “It was not easy to hear,” Ohel admitted. “I must say that I even fainted.” She paused. “I don’t think there’s a mother in this world that would even be able to sleep” knowing their child was enduring such suffering.

Meanwhile, the doctors treating this steady stream of walking dead, are sounding the alarm. “There is a clear and present danger to all of the hostages’ lives,” Dr. Hagai Levine warned reporters. Any more delay in their release, he said somberly, would almost certainly “cost lives.”

In the U.S., President Donald Trump was as stunned as the rest of the world at the condition of Ohad, Eli, and Or. “They were emaciated,” he shook his head. “It looked like many years ago, the Holocaust survivors, and I don’t know how much longer we can take that when I watch that.”

Stymied Negotiations

When Hamas reneged on the deal to free more hostages this weekend, the president unleashed an ultimatum: release everyone or the ceasefire deal is over. “All bets are off,” Trump told reporters Monday in the Oval Office. “Let all hell break out.” For now, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have been put on high alert, preparing for “any possible scenario in Gaza,” government officials say.

While the situation is still very fluid, CBN Middle East Bureau Chief Chris Mitchell joined “Washington Watch” on the ground in Israel, where he explained that there was “outrage throughout the country, especially among the country’s leaders” at the terrorists’ decision to pull the plug on this next prisoner swap, but also for the skeletal appearance of the men who returned. “We know that their conditions were just horrific. Many of them, some I think these men were kept in tunnels for the entire captivity and left on a starvation diet. … Throughout Israel, [these are] just heart-wrenching and horrific images that they had to see. Just gut-wrenching. And one more ride on this emotional roller coaster that Israelis have been on ever since October 7th.”

For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, there’s no easy solution. “This is all part of the dilemma that Prime Minister Netanyahu [and] the security cabinet have to deal with” Mitchell underscored, “how to manage and decide how to proceed with the war, as well as trying to proceed [to] release all of these hostages, both dead and alive.” It’s a difficult balancing act, he added, because of the diverse goals of the people.

“First of all, you have the hostage families. … [and] they want to do anything they can to get their loved ones freed.” But then, there are the Israelis who know that the Palestinian prisoners who’ve been released “will likely and historically go on to commit other terror attacks.” They’re worried about “who could be the next victims of terror.” And finally, he continued, “you have the men and women who have fallen in battle and their families are saying, ‘We don’t necessarily want the end of the war. We don’t want those members of our families to have died in vain.’ [It’s] such a difficult time for Israeli society on so many levels.”

Unfortunately, Netanyahu is in an impossible situation, Mitchell emphasized. The ones hurting the most, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins insisted, are almost certainly the hostages’ loved ones. “I think, obviously, the families lose out here, because I think this may be the last chance for a clear resolution of the hostage situation.” But if Hamas keeps playing games, Perkins insisted, look out. “Because then there’s no reason not to eliminate Hamas and move forward with the proposal that President Trump put on the table of basically clearing out the Gaza Strip and moving the Palestinians out. They could be the big losers in this.”

Most Israelis hope so. As the editor of The Jerusalem Post passionately wrote, these bony and broken men — Ohad, Eli, and Or — “stand as a living indictment of Hamas’s barbarism, an undeniable crime against humanity. The fact that some still equivocate, still seek to [assuage] ‘both sides’ this horror, is a stain on the conscience of the world. We must be clear,” Zvika Klein stressed, “Hamas does not take hostages. It takes human lives and reduces them to bargaining chips. Never Again is now. And if Israel does not act decisively, if the international community does not finally recognize this evil for what it is, we risk failing those still trapped in the depths of Gaza. They must be freed,” he insisted, “before it’s too late.”

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Republished with thanks to The Washington Watch. Image courtesy of Unsplash.