Traumatized and tortured: Freed hostages face arduous road to recovery
While many trauma experts say humans have a remarkable capacity for resilience, studies show that the psychological damage of captivity endures a lifetime
Reporter at The Times of Israel
Gaunt and visibly distressed, the three Israeli hostages freed last week from Gaza in the ceasefire deal, Or Levy, Eli Sharabi and Ohad Ben Ami, hobbled to freedom after 491 days in Hamas captivity. They now face the arduous task of recovery and rehabilitation, a journey that could take the rest of their lives.
“I’ve learned in the trauma field… that even after a lot of suffering, human beings can bounce back, which is the literal translation of resilience,” Dr. Danny Brom, founding director of Metiv, The Israel Psychotrauma Center, told The Times of Israel.
However, a longitudinal study on former prisoners of war from the 1973 Yom Kippur War found that captivity “produces deep and long-lasting psychological, somatic and functional injuries.” The study was conducted by the head of the Multidisciplinary Center of Excellence for Mass Trauma Research at Tel Aviv University, Prof. Zahava Solomon, and Bar-Ilan University’s Prof. Rachel Dekel, and published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.
Former POWs “carry their wounds for a very long time,” Solomon wrote.
Some of the Gaza hostages return to face tragedy — Sharabi’s wife and two teenage daughters were murdered on October 7, as was Levy’s wife. Others must come to terms with vastly altered situations, including destroyed houses and shattered communities, which also “complicates things enormously,” Brom said.
Still, even among victims of the Holocaust, “the majority do not develop psychopathology. Of course, they don’t forget, but mostly, they can move on and live with the memory and the pain of it,” Brom added.
The hostages released over the past few weeks are among 251 people kidnapped on October 7, 2023, when some 3,000 Hamas-led terrorists stormed into Israel, killing some 1,200 people and starting the war in Gaza.
Seventy-three of the 251 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza, including the bodies of at least 34 confirmed dead by the IDF.
Hamas has so far released 16 hostages during the ceasefire that began in January in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian security prisoners. The terror group also released five Thai nationals abducted on October 7, in a side deal.
While the Health Ministry said hospitals were prepared to provide the freed hostages with comprehensive medical care and psychological support, Eyal Calderon, the cousin of Ofer Calderon who was held in captivity for 484 days, told the Ynet news site that there’s “a long path ahead, rehabilitation will be lengthy and will have ups and downs.”
Hebrew media outlets also shared initial testimony from Levy, Sharabi and Ben Ami, citing conversations in which their family members said that the former hostages endured physical and psychological abuse during their captivity.
Yet, making comments on the mental health of the freed captives is “invasive and harmful to them,” warned Dr. Alan Flashman, who has taught mental health at Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, and Ben Gurion University.
‘Time to psychologically decompress’
The US Army runs a program called PISA, post-isolation support activities designed to help former hostages and kidnap victims, including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was held for more than a year in Russia on fabricated espionage charges.
The 10-day program at the Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas includes fostering the understanding that former prisoners “need time to psychologically decompress.”
A 2015 Joint Chiefs of Staff manual on personnel recovery shared with The Times of Israel by a PISA representative recommends that former hostages and captives to be allowed to “recount their story in a normal, healthy manner” and “develop an understanding of what their isolation, captivity meant to them.”
The recommendations also include forgoing media events, political photo opportunities, ceremonies, and celebrations too soon after the captives’ release because these activities “serve to increase the state of shock” and “usually end up overwhelming them.”
After release, there’s also sometimes a “boomerang effect,” said Dr. Tamar Lavi, senior researcher and head instructor of the clinical psychology department at NATAL, the Israel Trauma and Resiliency Center, which offers psychological and emotional treatment and support to victims of trauma due to war and terror. It can take “a few weeks until the adrenaline and all the hormones that allow people to survive” wear off, she said, adding that it can be difficult for people to face their feelings in the immediate aftermath of their release.
Lavi described an initial “very unstable period” in which a released captive “might be very happy, and the next moment very upset.”
In the case of the freed Gaza hostages, some of them not only have to face their own traumas, Lavi said, but must also deal with the reality that their communities, such as Kibbutz Nir Oz, have been decimated. Moreover, they are reintegrating into a country that has suffered massive collective trauma since the October 7 Hamas-led attack.
On top of all that, the released captives are also “thinking about the hostages still in Gaza, left behind,” Lavi said.
Levy told his family that on Saturday morning, ahead of his release, he had asked that a different hostage be freed instead of him and that it was extremely difficult for him to leave the others behind.
Personal cruelty
In their research on former prisoners 18 and 30 years after the Yom Kippur War, Solomon and Dekel wrote about how captivity causes more enduring psychological damage than combat does.
“The torture, humiliation, and isolation are part and parcel of captivity,” they wrote. “Beyond the hardships themselves, however, is the fact that they’re personal.”
The threat of combat is impersonal, they wrote. However, “the trauma of captivity occurs within the relationship between the captives and the captors. The special torments of captivity are part of a planned and concerted effort to break the individuals and are intentionally inflicted on them by persons they get to know and may relate to on a daily basis.”
This was evident in the way that Hamas terrorists tormented Yarden Bibas about the fate of his wife, Shiri, and two sons, Ariel and Kfir, during his 484-day captivity in Gaza.
The mother of freed captive Romi Gonen, Meirav Leshem Gonen, told Channel 12 news that her daughter’s guards mocked her about the open wound she had in her arm when she was brought into Gaza.
Levy told his relatives that ahead of their release, their captors took some of the hostages from place to place and paraded them in front of cheering terrorists.
“Psychological torture compounds the hostages’ suffering,” said Prof. Hagai Levine, head of the health team of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum. “Enduring isolation, constant fear of violence, and a complete lack of mental health support can lead to anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder.”
PTSD is a difficult-to-treat mental health condition triggered by either experiencing or witnessing a terrifying event, such as the October 7 Hamas atrocities. For those abducted by terrorists into Gaza, its severity can be compounded further.
Symptoms of the disorder may include flashbacks, nightmares, severe anxiety, and uncontrollable thoughts about what happened.
Personal experiences
Prolonged imprisonment, abduction, and physical and psychological torture make for “a very complex set of experiences,” Prof. Yair Bar-Haim, head of the National Center for Traumatic Stress and Resilience at Tel Aviv University, told The Times of Israel. “It’s important to remember that every person can have different reactions to the events that happen to them.”
He stressed the importance of not putting released hostages into one category.
“It’s very clear that they’re not all the same, and they don’t all have the same personality or the same trauma,” he said.
Still, said Lavi, “You don’t have to be too knowledgeable” about trauma to understand that “this is something that the hostages will carry their whole lives.”
