Hostages were drugged, abused in Gaza
TEL AVIV—Hostages hauled into Gaza during Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel were drugged to keep them docile in captivity and subjected to psychological and sexual abuse, a specialist said Monday.
“I’ve never seen anything like that” in 20 years of treating trauma victims, said Renana Eitan, director of the psychiatric division of the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Centre-Ichilov.
“The physical, the sexual, the mental, the psychological abuse of these hostages that came back is just terrible,” she added. “We have to rewrite the textbook.”
The center has received 14 ex-hostages released by Hamas, some of whom reported being drugged, including with what doctors believe were benzodiazapines, a class of depressants with a sedative effect that includes drugs like Valium.
“They wanted to control the kids, and sometimes it’s difficult to control young children, adolescents. And they know that if they drug them they will be quiet,” she added.
“One of the girls was given ketamine for a few weeks,” she continued, referring to a powerful dissociative anaesthetic known for giving the recipient a sense of detachment from their environment.
“It’s unbelievable to do this to a child.”
Eitan said some former hostages had also described psychological torment at the hands of their captors.
One was told his wife was dead when in fact she was still alive back in Israel, while children were separated from their families and shown “brutal videos.”
Hallucinations
One patient said she and others were held in total darkness for more than four days. “They became psychotic, they had hallucinations,” Eitan said. There were also reports of self-harm among hostages in captivity, she noted, while some returnees had since professed to having suicidal thoughts.
“But this is our mission, to make sure that such things will not happen,” she added.
Ichilov has also treated hundreds of physically wounded patients, both victims of Oct. 7 and soldiers injured in the ensuing war in the Gaza Strip.
Soldiers can be airlifted to Ichilov from the battlefield in about 15 minutes, according to vice chief of trauma surgery Eyal Hashavia. —AFP
