The female surveillance soldiers recently freed from Gaza were forced by Hamas to watch videos of their fellow captives being tortured, according to one of the women’s mothers.
Speaking with Channel 12 alongside three other hostage mothers of the surveillance troops, Shira Albag quoted her daughter Liri as saying: “I got out of the hell that we went through there, but the men, the soldiers, are going through worse than us."
“The terrorists also made a point to show them videos and sharing with them all sorts of things that they [the male hostages] were going through there, that they starved… all sorts of things that are really tough,” Shira added. “Even today when they’re here, we don’t know everything exactly that they went through.”
In a portion of the interview aired on Wednesday, the mother of released soldier hostage Daniella Gilboa detailed how Hamas forced her daughter to fake her own death for a propaganda video filmed while she was in captivity.
“One of the captors simply came to her with a camera and told her, ‘Today we are filming you dead,’” Orly Gilboa, Daniella’s mother, told Channel 12. “She pleaded for her life and asked they don’t do it.”
She claimed that Hamas covered Daniella in powder and debris to make it look as though she had been hit in an Israeli airstrike.
Orly added that, after her release last month as part of a ceasefire deal with Hamas, Daniella was distraught at the grief the video caused, saying: “When she saw me and my husband for the first time, she apologised for how she caused us to feel this whole time.”
In November, a spokesman for Hamas’s military wing claimed that “one of the enemy’s female prisoners was killed in an area that is under Zionist aggression in the northern Gaza Strip.”
Along with the statement, Hamas published a blurred image of a body they claimed was the slain hostage. Though they did not identify the woman, the picture led to speculation that it could be Daniella Gilboa, as it a tattoo on the body matched on of hers.
Hamas has frequently staged propaganda videos of hostages, a tactic Israel has condemned as deplorable psychological warfare. This has included claiming that hostages have been killed in Israeli strikes, only to release them alive subsequently.
Gilboa is one of seven female soldiers abducted from the IDF surveillance unit at the Nahal Oz army base during the Hamas-led massacre on October 7.
Another of the abducted soldiers, Ori Megidish, was later rescued alive, and the body of a third, Noa Marciano, was recovered after she was murdered in captivity.
Gilboa and the four other remaining soldiers—Liri Albag, Naama Levy, Agam Berger, and Karina Ariev—were freed in January under the terms of the ceasefire-hostage deal.
