Freed hostages: We heard our families in media, had to ration grains of rice between us

Channel 12 provides more details that released hostages have conveyed to their families from their time in captivity.

The network says some of the hostages heard family members talking about them in the media. One of the hostage women met another hostage in a Gaza hospital and only then realized there were other hostages besides her.

One told her family: “They told us no one is fighting for us, that [Israeli] Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu only wants war and doesn’t care about us. And then we heard an interview of a relative of a hostage and understood that we hadn’t been forgotten.”

Some didn’t know what happened to loved ones on October 7 and only found out when returning home.

Conditions in captivity were hard. “There was a point when we barely had any food at all,” one released woman told relatives. “We all sat around a plate of rice and tried to divide it equally between us, to the last grain. You find yourself counting. Such hunger can’t be explained.”

Liri Albag “would boost our morale. She told us stories all the time and told us to imagine things from our normal lives, like what we’d order at a restaurant we’d sit in.”