In an interview with the BBC, Itay Regev, a former Hamas hostage freed in late November, shared harrowing details of his captivity experience. Regev, kidnapped from the Nova music festival on October 7, described his captors as “very, very vicious” and recounted the brutal treatment he received.

Regev recalled the terrifying kidnapping, where terrorists sprayed fleeing vehicles with bullets “without any mercy,” injuring him and his sister Maya. He shared the heart-wrenching moment when Maya said goodbye, fearing she wouldn’t survive.

“I saw my sister Maya injured and crying. Maya also that day said goodbye to me and told me if I come out of this alive, tell our parents that she loves them. This is a day I will never forget for the rest of my life,” he said.

Regev said it was “like a big party” when he was brought into Gaza as a captive. In Gaza, Regev endured “horrific” conditions, going 54 days without a shower and living in constant fear. His captors subjected him to physical abuse, including slapping and spitting, during a surgery to remove a bullet without anesthesia or painkillers.

“We were very, very hungry. I didn’t have a shower for 54 days. My captors were very, very vicious. They didn’t care. I had wounds in my legs, big holes in my legs,” he said. “And you lived there in a horrific sense of fear. Every second that you live with this feeling is a terrible feeling, that you don’t really know if you’re going to wake up in the morning, or in a minute, if a missile is going to fall on you, if they’re going to come in with a Kalashnikov and start spraying us with bullets. The conditions are very, very difficult there.”

Regev emphasized the urgent need to release the remaining 134 hostages, stating, “The hostages have been there for five months now. The answer is unequivocally, no [the international community] is not doing enough.” He advocates for doing “whatever the cost” to secure their release, emphasizing, “It’s people’s lives.”

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)