Hamas battalion commander Bayan Abu Nar pressured former Gaza hostage Segev Kalfon to convert to Islam during the 738 days the terror group kept the Dimona baker hostage, the former captive told the New York Times in a Saturday interview.
From the moment he was taken from the Nova Music Festival, terrorists assaulted him, he recounted, while explaining how he eventually became numb to their blows. While blindfolded and bound, he told the NYT he recited the Shema.
Beatings, abuse, and danger in Hamas captivity
Speaking from a rehabilitation center in Ramat Gan, Kalfon described how his conditions worsened after National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir bragged about furthering restrictions on Palestinian prisoners. He is one among many hostages to tell the NYT they suffered worse treatment, in some cases beatings, for the Israeli official’s public statements.
Adding to the psychological torture, the terrorists would often play around with live grenades to scare them, Kalfon said.
In one instance, the terrorists forced Kalfon to play what they described as the “execution game” with hostages he was kept with. When the hostages refused to nominate three of them to be killed, the terrorist drew lots to decide which would die.
The execution never went ahead, as Abu Nar claimed that Islam prevented the killing of prisoners. He told Kalfon and the others that they had been saved by Islam, and began pressuring the hostages to convert - forcing them to listen to recitations of the Quran on the radio.
Even in the hours before his release, terrorists employed psychological torture. Kalfon recounted how they told him he alone would be sent back to the tunnels and would not return to Israel.
Kalfon said he also feared Israel’s “rain of missiles.”
“All I would think of was how to survive another day,” he recalled while describing how an Israeli strike hit the building he was being kept in alongside Yosef-Chaim Ohana and Maxim Herkin.
Months later, Kalfon was also in a tunnel that shook from a nearby airstrike, which killed the family of one of his captors. “I was scared to death of what he might do to me,” Kalfon said.
The terrorists kept the three men in unhygienic conditions, Kalfon described. They were forced to share a used toothbrush, kept in a building infested with rodents, and forbidden from communicating with one another.
Former Gaza hostage describes abandoning escape plan
Desperation led Kalfon to plan his own escape as the conditions of his captivity worsened in the second year, he said. He abandoned the plan after hearing his mother, Galit, on the radio say she missed him.
Hearing her voice, Kalfon said, was like “an ocean of hope” that he would return to Israel.
Kalfon also revealed that he could hear the IDF shooting at terrorists in Nuseirat as they rescued four other hostages in Operation Arnon. The terrorists locked him in the bathroom, and he believed he was going to die, but was later transferred to Hamas’s underground network of tunnels, where he would remain for 16 months.
It was in the tunnels that he met with Bar Kupershtein, Elkana Bohbot, and Ohad Ben-Ami.
Hostages starved while Gazan terrorists remained well-fed
The 27-year-old former prisoner also described the starvation experienced during captivity, at one point eating only a can of beans over a period of two days.
Sometimes the hostages were only given a quarter of a tomato and a bowl of rice to share, he said.
The captors “kept saying that if the people of Gaza above us were hungry, we would also go hungry,” Kalfon said.
While citing Israeli restrictions on the lack of food, Kalfon noted that the Hamas terrorists holding him always appeared well-fed.
Hamas terrorist admits regretting the October 7 attacks
In the period leading up to his release, Kalfon recounted how his captors increased his food supply.
For the final 10 weeks he was held by Hamas, Kalfon was left alone under the guard of Abu Nar.
One-on-one with the terrorist, Kalfon described the lengthy conversations he had with him, including one where Abu Nar said Hamas wouldn’t have gone through with the October 7 attacks if they understood the current reality would be the consequence.