Ex-hostage says Gazan doctors purposely caused her pain, poured chlorine into gunshot wound

Former hostage Maya Regev, who was released in November along with her brother in a deal after weeks in Hamas captivity, sheds light on the cruelty of Gazan doctors who treated her after she was shot in the leg on October 7.

“They would really hurt me,” she tells Channel 12 news. “When changing bandages, when they wanted to see the wounds, they would purposely cause pain. [The doctor] would take chlorine, alcohol, and sometimes even something like apple cider vinegar, and would pour it in [the wound] and apply pressure.”

She says that one day, he took a small knife and started cutting into her exposed flesh in the wound, ignoring her pleas to stop. “I wanted to kick him in the face, but he had a pistol and I had nothing, so I shut up,” she says, adding that she had feared at one point that the physicians were going to amputate her leg.

On one occasion, she got the captors to bring in her brother Itay — who was released together with her — and fellow hostage Omer Shem-Tov, who remains in captivity, to be with her for the bandage-changing. She describes how Shem-Tov cared for her, calmed her down and blocked her mouth so she wouldn’t scream, which she was forbidden from doing.

Sitting alongside Shem-Tov’s mother Shelly, Regev says that was the last time she saw Omer. Shelly says: “Omer is alive, and he must return home.”

Regev says she returned from Gaza with many infections, a fungus growing inside her bone, and other signs of medical negligence. Even eight months after her release, her road to recovery is still long.

She says that on the top of the list of things she wants to do is to walk on two legs again, but that with every additional surgery that dream seems to get farther away.