Alon Ohel, who was released last October after two years in Hamas captivity, said that he was starved by his captors, that his wounds were treated negligently and that he was sexually assaulted while being held.
“It happened when I was alone. You go in to shower and he, the captor, comes in to ‘wash your hair’,” he said in an interview aired Monday evening on Channel 12 News. “He starts soaping you in the shower.” According to him, the captor touched him and “put his hands on me.”
“I tried to push him away, told him I could manage on my own. He kept touching you. It was unpleasant.”
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Ohel said he never managed to get used to the hunger he endured in captivity. “We would eat one pita and four spoonfuls of peas a day,” he said. “There was a period when we survived only on dried dates. It’s constant pain throughout your entire body. You look like a skeleton. You look at yourself in the mirror and you don’t see a person – you see a corpse. And they’re happy, smiling, enjoying it. You spend hours and weeks lying there like a corpse, with no energy for anything.”
Ohel said his captors treated the wounds he sustained while fleeing the Nova Festival in a negligent and degrading manner. “They stitched me up without anesthesia, without anything, and left shrapnel inside.”
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He added that during his first two weeks in captivity, he was forbidden to speak: “They tear you out of your life in an instant. I was a 22-year-old kid – what did I know about handling something like this? They ripped me out of reality and put me in hell.”
He also described how he learned, while in captivity, about the campaign for his release. “They opened a laptop and showed me a picture of someone holding a drawing of me, with a piano behind her. That’s when I understood that people I didn’t know were fighting for me,” he said. “It gave me even more strength – if people who don’t know me are fighting for me, who am I to give up? We knew we weren’t forgotten, that we weren’t being left behind.”
Ohel added that IDF strikes hit close to the places where he was held. “The missiles fly right past you, hitting the building next door. One mistake in the coordinates and I’m dead,” he said. “And you pray. You think, fuck, now I have to fear the IDF as well – the army that was supposed to protect me.”
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Alon Ohel upon his return from Gaza captivity, in October. Credit: Rami Shllush
Alon Ohel upon his return from Gaza captivity, in October. Credit: Rami Shllush
He also spoke about the moment he was kidnapped on October 7 after attending the Nova Festival. “We ran from the party the moment the shelling started. When we saw Iron Dome interceptions, we bolted,” he said. “My friends said we should stop at a shelter. I wanted to keep going. We were standing in the shelter, and it didn’t stop. Then you start hearing Kalashnikovs. Where is the army? Then the grenades start. You’re waiting for your own death.”
That was when he saw Aner Shapira. “He didn’t even look me in the eye. He saved all of us,” Ohel said. Shapira repelled one hand grenade after another that the terrorists threw inside, until he was killed.
At one point during his captivity, Ohel said, he was moved to the northern Gaza Strip, where he met Guy Gilboa-Dallal after eight months of being held alone.
“Guy and I were together in a course during our military service,” he said. “We were both shaved like in the army. They took us down to the tunnels again. We said, well, at least we’re together. The moment I saw Guy, they told me they wanted me to write a letter to my family. It felt fake, but I wrote whatever was in my heart at that moment.” His mother, Idit, later confirmed that the family did receive the letter.