He was starved, beaten often and severely, and forced to dig tunnels for his captors.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
Segev Kalfon, one of the 20 live Israeli hostages freed as part of the Trump peace deal on Oct. 10, revealed part of his horrific experiences as a captive to Ynet and Yedioth Ahronoth on Tuesday.
He was captured by Hamas forces while attempting to flee the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, 2023, and was beaten so severely all over his body he thought he might die on the spot, he said.
When brought to Gaza, he was asked his name, and every time he said it he was beaten, and a knife was even pressed to his throat.
It turned out that “Segev” sounds like the Arabic word for “ceiling,” so the terrorists did not believe him.
After a few hours, when they called him “Steve” instead, he decided not to correct them.
He was held in various apartments with Yosef Chaim Ohana and Maxim Herkin before a nearby IDF bombing led their captors to move them into a tunnel, together with Ohad Ben Ami, Elkanah Bohbot, and Bar Kuperstein.
They were forced to dig tunnels for their captors, as well as holes for latrines for both captors and captives to use, “because Jews are zeroes, nothings,” he said.
The group was together for 11 long months and was in constant danger of their lives, he said.
The feeling was “something that accompanied you there every day, every morning, every moment,” he explained.
In such a situation, he said, “death becomes your best friend, you talk to death all the time. It’s impossible to describe it, in the end you come to terms with the fact that your life is always in danger.”
The beatings continued underground, especially when an Israeli politician would say things that angered their captors.
He gave as an example Internal Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s televised description of the harsh prison conditions of the Hamas Nukhba terrorists that the IDF had caught.
Considering that they sat in “complete darkness,” any light was welcome, but the glow of an approaching flashlight “became a sign of evil coming to us,” Kalfon said. “We knew we were about to be beaten, we were afraid, we clung to the walls and prepared.”
They slept on paper-thin mattresses on a crooked floor and were given little food, which they shared equally, Kalfon said.
“Even toilet paper, when there was any, I would give out one square at a time,” he recalled. “A bottle of water was like gold. Today, nothing is taken for granted.”
Kalfon, who was also held alone for several months, did not always obey his Hamas guards.
He decided to resist making a propaganda video for them by not looking into the camera or saying the lines written out for him.
“I played it like a bad actor because I thought about my parents, my family. I didn’t want to say that a tunnel had collapsed on me, that I was suffering and hungry, that my life was in danger,” he said.
Kalfon’s family, who had been told by an eyewitness of their son’s capture, only found out that Segev was still alive in February, when Ohad Ben Ami was released in the second hostage deal.
At the time, Ben Ami told them that Kalfon, an IDF combat veteran who had come out of the army suffering from PTSD, was experiencing panic attacks, dissociative episodes and fits of rage while in captivity.
The post Ex-hostage Segev Kalfon: ‘Death becomes your best friend’ appeared first on World Israel News.