Hamas made surveillance troops watch torture videos of male hostages, says mother
Freed hostages’ mothers say daughters kept diaries during 477 days in captivity; one says she would’ve looked like emaciated captives released last week had she been set free earlier
The female surveillance soldiers recently freed from Gaza after over 15 months in captivity were forced by Hamas to watch videos of male hostages being tortured, one of their mothers revealed in an in-depth television interview aired Thursday evening.
Speaking with Channel 12 news alongside three other mothers of the surveillance troops, Shira Albag quoted her daughter Liri as saying, “I got out of the hell that we went through there, but the men, the soldiers, are going through worse than us.”
“The terrorists also made a point to show them videos and share with them all sorts of things that they [the male hostages] were going through there, that they were starving… all sorts of things that are really tough,” the soldier’s mother said. “Even today when they’re here, we don’t know everything exactly what they went through.”
Albag, along with Karina Ariev, Daniella Gilboa, Naama Levy and Agam Berger, was kidnapped from the IDF’s Nahal Oz military base on October 7, 2023, and released by the terror group last month in the first phase of an ongoing hostage-ceasefire deal.
The women described watching their daughters being paraded by masked Hamas gunmen through a Gaza City square before being handed over to the Red Cross on January 25. Berger was released a week later.
“It was happiness, but I felt like I was just going to faint, I couldn’t feel my legs. But as soon as I saw her in the room – there’s just nothing like it: hearing her voice, hugging her, breathing her in,” said Ariev’s mother, Ira.
“When I saw her get out of the car, I made sounds out of my mouth that I didn’t know I could make. It was truly a very moving moment,” said Gilboa’s mother, Orly.
The mothers said their daughter had kept journals in Gaza, “literally filled notebooks,” which their captors had burned before releasing the hostage soldiers.
“They wrote diaries there, literally filled notebooks, with dates and what happened to them each day… what they ate, what they drank, how many times they went to the bathroom,” Shira said.
Albag’s mother said that Hamas had purposely exposed the hostages to news from Israel during periods when negotiations for a deal with the terror group were stalled, to make them think that securing their release “wasn’t the most important thing.”
They also spoke about how their daughters were readjusting to being home after 477 days in captivity, each mentioning that they prefer not to sleep alone since their release.
“In general, I’m happy to see that she’s doing well, she’s sleeping well, but she does sleep next to me,” Dr. Ayelet Levy Shachar, Naama Levy’s mother, said in the interview.
“Liri is fine, overall she’s fine. She is home, that’s what we dreamed of and wished for for so long,” Shira said. “But it’s complicated because she is aware of the situation and she is aware of everything that is happening and she doesn’t yet understand everything that is happening… and she has to fill in the gaps of this entire period.”
She said that watching the release of three male hostages — Eli Sharabi, Ohad Ben Ami and Or Levy — who were released by the terror group last weekend looking gaunt and unsteady on their feet was overwhelming for her daughter.
“We all sat and watched the release at home, and I didn’t look at the TV, I looked at Liri and she froze and I saw that she wasn’t with us, so, of course, we immediately turned off the off, because we saw that it was too much for her.”
Orly said her daughter had told her that if she had been released two months earlier she, too, would have looked emaciated.
“To see her in this state today and say, ‘Well, she probably ate well, she was fine’ — that’s not true: there were periods when they had nothing to eat or the same portion was used for four, because there were four of them at the time, and after that, it was used for two, so they had the opportunity to gain a little weight,” she said.
In a portion of the interview aired Wednesday, Orly detailed how Hamas forced her daughter to fake her death for a propaganda video it filmed while she was in captivity, leading to rumors she had been killed.
She described how a Hamas operative had covered her daughter in powder to look like she’d been hit by an IDF airstrike for the video.
“It was a very, very difficult moment, I think the most difficult moment in this entire period. In the first day or two, my world was shattered, because I thought this was really the end of the story,” she said.
The five released hostage soldiers were among seven female troops abducted from the IDF surveillance unit during the Hamas-led massacre, which saw thousands of terrorists burst across the border, killing some 1,200 people and seizing 251 hostages, mostly civilians, amid acts of brutality and sexual assault. Berger was released five days after her comrades.
One of the abducted surveillance soldiers, Ori Megidish, was later rescued alive, and Noa Marciano’s body was recovered after she was murdered in captivity.
Seventy-three of the 251 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza, including the bodies of at least 35 confirmed dead by the IDF.
Hamas has so far released 21 hostages — civilians, soldiers, and Thai nationals — during the ceasefire that began in January. The terror group freed 105 civilians during a weeklong truce in late November 2023, and four hostages were released before that.
Eight hostages have been rescued by troops alive, and the bodies of 40 hostages have also been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the Israeli military as they tried to escape their captors.
Hamas is also holding two Israeli civilians who entered the Strip in 2014 and 2015, as well as the body of an IDF soldier who was killed in 2014. The body of another IDF soldier, also killed in 2014, was recovered from Gaza in January.
