Hostages released by Hamas under a ceasefire deal have described their “hellish” experiences and called for a new agreement to rescue the men and women left behind.
Israeli and Hamas negotiators said hostage talks were over after the ceasefire ended and fighting in Gaza resumed over the weekend.
Saleh al-Arouri, a senior Hamas figure, said there would be no more talks until the end of the war. He identified the remaining hostages, who include men in their eighties, as “soldiers and former soldiers”.
“The price to pay for the release of Zionist prisoners will be the release of all our prisoners, after a ceasefire,” he told Al-Jazeera television.
Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, pulled his negotiating team, led by David Barnea, the head of Mossad, out of Qatar, where the talks have been held.
However, at a rally in Tel Aviv on Saturday night, former hostages appeared in person and on video clips and appealed for all the other hostages to be freed — including their husbands and sons.
“If not for all of you, I would not be here,” Yelena Trufanova, 50, told thousands of supporters. A Russian-Israeli, she was released on Wednesday night with her mother, Irena Tati, 73, but her son Alexander Trufanov remains in captivity. His fiancée, Sapir Cohen, was set free the next day.
“Now, now, now,” Trufanova and the crowd chanted. “We need to get my Sasha back,” she added.
The crowd also watched a video address by Yaffa Adar, the 85-year-old great-grandmother whose kidnapping by golf cart became one of the best-known images of the events of October 7.
She was among the hostages freed on the first day of the ceasefire. “I am a voice for many mothers and grandmothers asking, ‘release the children now’,” she said. “I want to see them now, not when I’m in a coffin.”
Adar, whose grandson Tamir remains in Hamas’s hands, called her experience “hell”.
Many hostages have now described either directly by video or through their families the nature of their treatment while in captivity.
Danielle Aloni, 44, who was released along with her five-year-old daughter Emilia, said “every day was an eternity”.
“Our daughters saw things they should not have seen,” she said. “I am shaking as I speak. It was a horror movie. There was no schedule. You sleep, you weep.”
Several hostages have said that food supplies, adequate to begin with, began to run short as the weeks went by.
Some feared their relatives would suffer punishment. “I’m afraid the older people and the young will not stand the pressure,” said Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, who was set free within days of the October 7 attacks as a “goodwill gesture”.
Her husband, Oded, 83, remains in Gaza. “It is the government’s moral obligation to bring them home,” she said.
Children taken hostage by Hamas in Gaza were told “nobody cares about you” by their captors, and many are suffering psychologically and physically from their ordeal, doctors have said.
Dr Efrat Harlev, one of the paediatricians caring for released hostages at Schneider Children’s Medical Centre, in Petah Tikva, east of Tel Aviv, said that 19 of the child hostages treated at the hospital had lost 10-15 per cent of their body weight.
The children were struggling to eat properly again, instead wanting to save the food as they had done when food was scarce in captivity.
Harlev said that a 13-year-old girl she was treating told her: “I actually thought that everyone forgot about me… this is what I’ve been told by the Hamas kidnappers.”
She added: “They told me she said that nobody cares about you anymore. Nobody’s looking for you. Nobody wants you back. You can hear the bombs around. All they want to do is kill you and us together.”
During a press conference in Israel on Monday, relatives said that children’s behaviour had changed as a result of being held hostage in Gaza for seven weeks.
The grandfather of Yahel Shoham, three, who was freed from Hamas captivity on November 25, says she only spoke in a whisper for a week after being released. Shoham, whose father, Tal, is still held hostage, was freed along with her mother Adi and 8-year-old brother Naveh, as well as her grandmother, Shoshan. Her maternal grandfather was killed on October 7.
The family of Yagil, 12, and Or Yaakov, 16, claimed that the boys were drugged and then branded so that they would be recognised if they tried to escape.
“Hamas took the leg of each child and stuck it in on a motorcycle tail pipe to make a mark in case they escape, so they could find them,” their uncle, Yaniv Yaakov, said.
Thai workers who were seized, apparently because Hamas fighters mistakenly thought they were soldiers, said they saw Israeli men who were soldiers being whipped with electric cables.
Mia Schem, 21, a French woman kidnapped from the Supernova dance party at Re’im, was forced to take part in a hostage video, in which she said she had been treated for an injury to her arm. On release, she said the person who performed the three-hour surgery was a vet.
During the week-long ceasefire, 81 Israelis and 24 foreign citizens were released, leaving between 130-140 hostages still in Gaza.
The Israeli government has used videos of the scenes of the kidnappings and information from the hostages to declare a number of those who were seized dead, and informed their families.
Not all hostage families agree with the exchange. Zvika Mor, whose son Eitan, 23, was abducted from the Supernova party, said the release of Palestinian prisoners would “lead to the next massive terrorist attack on Israel”.
Mor, who lives in the settlement of Kiryat Arba, near Hebron in the West Bank, said that “paying whatever it takes” was defeatist.
Meanwhile the RAF confirmed on Sunday that it had sent Shadow R1 surveillance aircraft to help the search for intelligence on where the hostages, who include British citizens, are being held in Gaza.
“The safety of British nationals is our utmost priority,” the Ministry of Defence said. “In support of the ongoing hostage rescue activity, the UK Ministry of Defence will conduct surveillance flights over the eastern Mediterranean, including operating in air space over Israel and Gaza.”
Hamas claimed Britain would be participating in a “genocidal war against the Palestinian people” and called on the UK to reconsider.
In Gaza meanwhile reports claimed that four babies whose decomposing bodies were found at the al-Nasr paediatric hospital had been left there after staff looking after them were told to leave by the Israeli army, which promised they would be transferred to safety.
An investigation by the Washington Post quoted the staff as saying they had been given “half an hour” to get out by the army, but that the babies were too sick to be taken off ventilators. Israeli officials promised to send ambulances to the hospital and a neighbouring one, al-Rantisi.
A local journalist, during the ceasefire two weeks later, approached the hospital and discovered the four babies dead.
Matthew Miller, the US State Department spokesman, suggested that Hamas is holding onto a number of female Israeli hostages because it does not want them to testify about what they experienced in captivity.
“The fact that they continue to hold women hostages, the fact that they continue to hold children hostages, just the fact that it seems one of the reasons they don’t want to turn women over they’ve been holding hostage, and the reason this pause fell apart, is they don’t want those women to be able to talk about what happened to them during their time in custody,” Miller said in response to a question from a reporter about growing evidence of Hamas rape and sexual abuse on October 7.
“There is very little that I would put beyond Hamas when it comes to its treatment of civilians, and particularly its treatment of women,” he adds.
