Captivity Health Ministry – Hostages suffering severe malnutrition; Herzog: Crime against humanity
“Completing the hostage deal is a humanitarian, moral, and Jewish duty,” Herzog added.
Group of October 7 victims’ families says emaciated condition of Eli Sharabi, Or Levy, Ohad Ben Ami evokes Holocaust images * Ben Ami’s mom: ‘He looks like a skeleton’
By ToI Staff
The three hostages who were freed from Gaza on Saturday morning are suffering from “severe malnutrition” and lost significant body weight during their 491 days in captivity, the Health Ministry said on Saturday evening, after initial medical checks in the hours following their release.
“These are difficult scenes,” Health Ministry representative Dr. Hagar Mizrahi said at a press conference from Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv, where two of the released hostages were beginning their recovery.
The three hostages freed by Hamas — Eli Sharabi, 52, Or Levy, 34, and Ohad Ben Ami, 56 — looked emaciated and unsteady on their feet as they were released by the terror group, 16 months after they were kidnapped from Kibbutz Be’eri and the Nova music festival.
Still, Mizrahi added, doctors were also “excited to see them walking on their own two feet, upright and proud.”
President Isaac Herzog said the emaciated state of the hostages is “what a crime against humanity looks like,” as families of Hamas victims likened the gaunt men to images from the Holocaust, saying their condition underscored the urgency to complete the ceasefire and hostage release deal and secure the freedom of all the hostages.
Many family members, watching from Israel, burst into tears as the three were paraded by terrorists in central Gaza’s Deir el-Balah before being handed over to the Red Cross.
Herzog wrote on X that “the whole world must look directly at Ohad, Or, and Eli— returning after 491 days of hell, starved, emaciated and pained — being exploited in a cynical and cruel spectacle by vile murderers. We take solace in the fact that they are being returned alive to the arms of their loved ones.”