The undated 37-second video of Noa Argamani, 26, Yossi Sharabi, 53, and Itai Svirsky, 38, released on Sunday night showed them speaking presumably under duress, pleading with Israel’s government to end the war and get them home.
The clip ended with a Hamas caption that on Monday, “we will inform you of their fate”. Israel has blasted such videos as psychological warfare and insists it will not be deflected from its goals in Gaza, after Hamas launched raids into southern Israel on October 7 that claimed 1,200 lives.
Among the targets was a music festival from which Ms Argamani and her boyfriend were seized. An early clip released by Hamas showed her pleading for her life as she was taken away on the back of a motorbike.
Noa is a friend of a friend. This whole thing has been utter shit and we still don’t know if she’s actually still alive.
I’m so sorry. I’m keeping your friend and all the other hostages in my prayers.
I understand the sentiment, but I wish there was less praying in this world and more science. See for instance, I don’t know, exhibit A - the Palestine Israel conflict.
Who the fuck downvotes well wishes to proclaim science is the solution to Palestine conflict?
Fuck off you ghoul.
these fuckers gonna give more ammunition to explode gaza
It is Hamas’ goal to maximize martyrs, and they have officially stated so on several occasions. They were slowly losing the decades-long conflict with Israel (who have in no way been playing fair before this escalation btw). If they ensure enough suffering in their own population, they have more desperate traumatized orphans to recruit, more enraged sympathy from neighboring countries also in conflict with Israel, plus lessening the support from Israel’s western allies.
I feel like people forget about this. Hamas wants their constituents to die. They want to put their weaponry and bases inside hospitals and places of worship because they know IDF will have to seize or attack them and making them look bad for damaging health facilities and mosques. I am pro-Palestine and pro-Israel, but I notice there’s a lack of nuance too often in the pro-Palestine movement. I know most Gazans are not involved in Hamas. But few realize that most Israeli citizens are uninterested in destroying Gaza. Israel’s military and executive leadership has made poor decisions. But this does not necessarily equate to the country at large being genocidal.
They were slowly losing the decades-long conflict with Israel
Were they? If anything it seems Israel is the one losing international standing with every Israeli atrocity.
I was referring to Israel slowly grabbing land and displacing the population in favour of their own settlers.
And they keep taking land in the West Bank and they’re pushing everyone in Gaza into a smaller and smaller area. Sounds like they’re getting what the leadership wants.
International standing only matters if America can get over playing blind defense for Netanyahu’s coalition. They know this, the SA case in the ICJ has shown quotes from Israeli leadership that are abhorrent. Bold statements of genocidal intent from people that don’t expect consequences to reach them.
“Actually, Hamas genocided their own people. You know, for like profit or something”
The American lib brainworms are literally wriggling out your ears
Learn to read before throwing out smug insults. They aren’t genociding, they’re baiting Israel into validating their existence as a militant force and bolstering support through martyrdom.
Do you understand the dynamics of an extremist organization? One facing an enemy many times better equipped than themselves? Or are you assuming they’re too stupid to realize what Israel’s response would be to oct 7?
Misleading reporting. For those who understand Arabic, it is clear that what they mean is that Israel bombing gaza is threatening the fate of hostages.
Hamas has repeatedly said they are treating hostages better than their own, protecting them and giving them food and water. Many of the released hostages reiterated this.
Whether you deny how they treat hostages is one thing, but this reporting here making it sound like Hamas is threatening the hostages is bad journalism.
Where’s the video?
Downvoted for bad reporting.
The idea that Hamas “treat hostages well” is such a viciously stupid and deceitful claim I don’t even know where to start. You should be ashamed of yourself for spreading such vile idiocy, and for accepting at face value the message of a desperate hostage held at gunpoint in a Jihadist terror dungeon.
Reminder that hostages were more afraid to be killed by israel’s bombing than by Hamas
“We were in tunnels, terrified that it would not be Hamas but Israel that would kill us, and then they would say Hamas killed you,’’ she said. “So I strongly urge that the prisoner exchange begins as soon as possible and everyone needs to return home.’’
From every single hostage released we hear the same story, they were treated well, not beaten, just underfed when food started running out after a few weeks just like every other Palestinian in Gaza.
From this source:
Many of the Israeli hostages, according to interviews with family members, returned “malnourished, infested with lice, ill, injured and deeply traumatized,” the Times also reported.
Also important to note, it is likely that some hostages are treated under “acceptable” conditions for propaganda purposes. Also, many hostages’ family members were murdered on october 7. So that unto itself very much contradicts with the absurd claim that they were “treated well”.
Numerous women who were released have testified that they and many of the other women they met in the tunnels had been brutalised, sexually assaulted and raped, as well as verification by doctors.
At least 10 of the Israeli civilians released by Hamas, both men and women, were sexually assaulted or abused while in captivity, the Associated Press reported Wednesday.
In a report detailing allegations of severe and widespread sexual abuse by Hamas terrorists during their October 7 onslaught and later against hostages, a doctor who treated some of the 110 hostages released from captivity told the AP that at least 10 men and women among those freed were sexually assaulted or abused.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/world/middleeast/oct-7-attacks-hamas-israel-sexual-violence.html
Many of the accounts are difficult to bear, and the visual evidence is disturbing to see.
The Times viewed photographs of one woman’s corpse that emergency responders discovered in the rubble of a besieged kibbutz with dozens of nails driven into her thighs and groin.
The Times also viewed a video, provided by the Israeli military, showing two dead Israeli soldiers at a base near Gaza who appeared to have been shot directly in their vaginas.
[…]
The first victim she said she saw was a young woman with copper-color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her, Sapir said, and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.
She said she then watched another woman “shredded into pieces.” While one terrorist raped her, she said, another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off her breast.
“One continues to rape her, and the other throws her breast to someone else, and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road,” Sapir said.
She said the men sliced her face and then the woman fell out of view. Around the same time, she said, she saw three other women raped and terrorists carrying the severed heads of three more women.
Sapir provided photographs of her hiding place and her wounds, and police officials have stood by her testimony and released a video of her, with her face blurred, recounting some of what she saw.
Jamal Waraki, a volunteer medic with the nonprofit ZAKA emergency response team, said he could not get out of his head a young woman in a rawhide vest found between the main stage and the bar.
“Her hands were tied behind her back,” he said. “She was bent over, half naked, her underwear rolled down below her knees.”
Yinon Rivlin, a member of the rave’s production team who lost two brothers in the attacks, said that after hiding from the killers, he emerged from a ditch and made his way to the parking area, east of the party, along Route 232, looking for survivors.
Near the highway, he said, he found the body of a young woman, on her stomach, no pants or underwear, legs spread apart. He said her vagina area appeared to have been sliced open, “as if someone tore her apart.”
