Editor’s note: This reporting contains graphic descriptions.
Gaza – Fighting may have stopped, but not the Hamas digging.
Every day from 5th to midnight, seven days a week, the team guarding Israeli hostage Tal Shoham used a type of electrical hammer to carve extra miles from the soft clay Gaza, he said. The former hostage, released last month in the first phase of ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, recalled that the digging teams were rotating in nine -hour shifts. In the 17th months, since the terrorist organization began its surprise in Israel on October 7, 2023, it seemed that Hamas had survived in the drying bombing of Israel by continuous expansion of its huge tunnel network, which bee ignited under the gas and appeared from Israeli officials like “Metro.”
Shoham said he and three others were kept in a 120 square meter tunnel shaft for more than 200 days, almost half of the total 505 days were held captive by Hamas. To get there, he told me that he had been led for two and a half hours through the Subway, shocked by his labyrinthous spread under the Gaza strip. He said the main subway line – which Shoham says Hamas told him It connects northern and southern gas – it is probably still intact and every day the teams are digging new branches and shafts on the surface. His Hamas captives said you could walk five days from Gaza to the north to Rafa to the south, according to Shoham. He said Hamas was very proud of work.
Tal Shoham, a hostage, which took place in Gaza after the deadly attack on October 7, 2023, reacted when he reacted with his family again after he was released as part of an exchange of hostages and a deal to end the fire between Hamas and Israel, February 225 2025.
Gpo via Reuters
At about 300 years old as a hostage to Hamas, Shoham said he was dressed as a man from Gazan, leaving the safe house where he was held and leads a meander a walk on the streets of Gaza to meet an ambulance, which then leaned him into a tunnel structure. Shoham was then tied with his eyes and said he had descended into an underground space. He said that his abductors then removed his tied eyes, and he had to throw himself low to enter the first level, where, looking up, he saw what he described as a huge improvised explosive device, which he told him that he was intended to collapse.
As he went down, he said, the air suffocated him – moist, dull and yet thin, as if at height. He was told he was going to a doctor, but instead he was introduced to hell, he said: A 50-foot, 3-foot wide tunnel 60 feet underground, where there were three other men. The four were sleeping (from head to toe), defective and breastfeeding the wounds of their beating there for nearly a year. At one point, Shoham said they had been given the deck cards, but they could only play two at a time because the tunnel was too narrow for the four to sit in a circle. It took a month to acclimate to the lack of oxygen and much longer for the claustrophobia to live in the pipe for the whole ark, he said. The smell of food from the air -conditioned security room would apply it. There is talk of suicide, Shoham said, but since their guards were so afraid that they were happening, they installed cameras in the tunnel and delivered to the hostages who spent the underground.
Shoham was abducted with his family from Kibbutz from Beaeri in southern Israel. He was taken first, he said – before 20 of their neighbors and friends were killed. In the first six weeks of captivity, Shoham was collected with obsessive thoughts about their fate. He said he would go through various scenarios: that his wife Adi would be dead and their two children survived, one child dead, and the other was killed, or “the most difficult of all my wife Adi survived,” and the children killed. So to end the Pain, He Said He Decided to Bury Them: “I imagined a big grave and two small ones with all of my community in my village and best I gave a speech to Every One of My Life. […] Do it for yourself, but if they are dead, just to let them go. “
ABC News Matt Gutman interviews the released Israeli hostage Tal Shoham, who has been held captive by Hamas for more than 500 days.
Hugo Leenhardt/ABC News
A few days later, he said he had learned that they had been captured and were among 50 mostly women and children released during the temporary termination of the war reached in November 2023.
After about 30 days in captivity, Shoham said that Guy Gilboa-Dalal and Eviatar David were brought to the safe house where he was held. About nine months later, the three were taken underground and left where he said they were placed in a tunnel with his counterpart hostage Omer Venkert, whom Shoham said he was already there.
But for the 40-year-old Shoham it was much worse. In his mouth, an infection began, then the pain and inflammation came, the opening of old wounds, then the swelling in the legs and the inability to walk, he said. He was on the bed, and his colleagues hostages joked that he was “dead who was walking.” He said Hamas captives had taken off a doctor, but could not diagnose the problem, so they gave him antibiotics. It was only after the release of Shoham in February doctors diagnosed it with a disease so common for sailors before the 18th century: advanced scurvy.
Shoham had gone from 179 pounds to 110 pounds during his captivity, he said. The four men counted grains of rice to ensure that they were divided equally. Shoham said their guards told them that they were on purpose, so that after their release, the images of their skeletal frameworks and sunken faces would ignite the Israeli public and force the Netanyahu government to overcome a deal. But Hamas’s plan turned. When the world saw hostages Eli Sharabi, released on February 8, there was a protest. In the last two weeks of his captivity, Shoham said he and others were stuffed with food. He was 124 pounds when the Red Cross refused him back to Israel.
The brigader of the tunnel team would beat them with Lur, Shoham said, raising Venkert’s head, then asked the hostages to massage him and ask them why they did not love him – a special kind of sadism.
The termination of the fire between Hamas and Israel was reached in January, and 25 living hostages were released as part of the first phase, as well as the bodies of eight deceased hostages the next month. Hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel have also been issued.
But there is a delay in negotiations on the second phase of the agreement, which was to see the Israeli forces to completely withdraw from the Gaza Strip; The release of the 59 remained Israeli men, civilians and soldiers in exchange for a contractual number of prisoners in Israeli prisons and a constant termination of military operations and hostilities, officials said.
