In his first interview since being freed, former hostage Yosef-Haim Ohana offered a chilling, firsthand account of his 738 days in Hamas captivity — a nightmare of arbitrary beatings, psychological torment, and near-execution.

Ohana, abducted from the Supernova music festival on October 7, 2023, described moments when his life hung by a thread. “Suddenly an irritated man enters the room, pulls out his handgun, holds it against my head, [and asks], ‘Tell me how many people have you killed. Now I will kill you,’” he recalled. “Then some sheikh came, grabbed his arm and pulled, and told him, ‘Not now.’”

He recounted brutal and methodical assaults, sometimes spontaneous, other times “organized,” as captors justified their violence as revenge for Israeli military actions.

“They let us choose between us, who to kill, who to just hurt. They ran a lottery for us,” he said.

Ohana vividly described the terror of confinement in a pitch-black tunnel, illuminated only by a dim LED light. “When someone came with a lamp, at first we thought maybe they’d bring us tea. One time they came and started beating us. Since then, we called it ‘the lamps are coming.’ Every time we saw lamps, we had panic attacks,” he said.

He survived, he said, by appealing to his captors’ self-interest: “I told them, ‘If I’m dead, fewer prisoners will be released. Keep me alive for your cause.’”

Ohana was one of 20 living hostages freed earlier this month as part of phase one of U.S. President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan. The remains of 13 others are still held in Gaza.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)