Freed hostage Itay Regev tells BBC he was spat on, slapped during anesthesia-free surgery in Gaza

Freed hostage Itay Regev tells the BBC in an interview that he was held in “horrific” conditions by “very, very vicious” captors and did not think he would ever make it out alive.

Visiting London to advocate for the remaining hostages — including his close friend Omer Shem Tov, Regev says he is there to “scream their cries from Gaza,” and demand the international community do more to free the 130 hostages still being held.

“For five months not to see the sunlight and you don’t know what’s happening with your family, for five months to be in horrific conditions and hungry,” he says. “They have to be taken out of there as quickly as possible. They have the horrible feeling of not knowing what their fate will be from one second to the next.”

Regev was released during a truce in late November. He describes being “very, very hungry” during his captivity and believing he would die. “I didn’t have a shower for 54 days. My captors were very, very vicious. They didn’t care. I had wounds in my legs, big holes in my legs… you lived there in a horrific sense of fear. Every second that you live with this feeling is a terrible feeling, that you don’t really know if you’re going to wake up in the morning.”

He says that he was shot during his kidnapping, and then taken to a hospital where a doctor, alongside several Hamas operatives, removed the bullet from his leg without any anesthesia or painkillers.

“They put the forceps into my leg and they pulled out the bullet without anesthesia. They told me to be quiet because if I wasn’t quiet they’d kill me. In all that time there was more abuse, slaps to the face, spitting.”