Editor Note: This report contains graphic descriptions.
Gaza – The fight may have stopped, but not the excavation of Hamas.
Every day from 5 am to midnight, seven days a week, the team that monitored the Israeli host Shoham used a type of electric demolition hammer to carve additional tunnel miles from the soft Gaza Clay, he said. The former hostage, released last month in the first phase of a high fire between Israel and Hamas, recalled that the excavation teams turned in nine -hour shifts. In the 17 months since the terrorist organization launched its surprise from Rampage through Israel on October 7, 2023, Hamas seems to have survived Israel’s bombing campaigns through the incessant expansion of its vast network of tunnels that Honeycomb below Gaza and has been known by Israeli’s officials as “The Metro”.
Shoham said that he and three others were maintained on a 120 -square -feet tunnel axis for more than 200 days, almost half of the total of 505 days kept him captive by Hamas. To get there, he told me that he was taken on a two -and -a -half -hour walk through “The Metro”, shocked by his labyrinthine appearance under the gaza strip. Said the main line of the subway, which Shham says that Hamas told him Connects the north and south of Gaza, it is likely that it is still intact, and every day the teams dig new branches and axles to the surface. His Hamas captors said you could walk for five days from the city of Gaza in the north to Rafah in the south, according to Shham. He said Hamas was very proud of work.
Such Shoham, a hostage that was arrested in Gaza from the deadly attack of October 7, 2023, reacts while gathering with his family, after being released as part of an exchange of host prisoners and a high fire agreement between Hamas and Israel, on February 22, 2025.
GPO through Reuters
Around the 300th day in his time as Hamas, Shham said he was dressed as a man from Gazan, he left the Safe house where they had kept him and taken to a walk through the streets of Gaza to meet an ambulance, which then led him to a tunnel structure. Shoham was later with bandaged eyes and said he descended to an underground space. He said that his captors took their eyes bandaged and had to bend down to enter the first level, where, looking up, he saw what he described as a great improvised explosive device that said that his captors told him that he was destined to collapse the tunnel if the Israel defense forces entered.
As he descended more, he said, the air suffocated: wet, wet and thin, as in altitude. He had been told that he was going to a doctor, but instead he was introduced to hell, he said: a tunnel 50 feet long and 3 feet wide to 60 feet underground where there were three other men. The four slept (from head to toe), defined and cared for the wounds of their beatings there for almost a year. At one point, Shoham said they were given a deck of cards, but that they could only play two at the same time because the tunnel was too narrow so that the four would sit in a circle. Shoham took a month to acclimatize to the lack of oxygen, and much more time for the claustrophobia of living in the tube of the entire coffin, he said. The smell of food from the room of the guards with air conditioning would hire it. There was talk of suicide, Shoham said, but because their guards feared that happened, they installed cameras in the tunnel and provided the hostages a single set of plastic utensils they used (and never cleaned with water) during the 200 days that happened underground.
Shoham had been kidnapped with his family from Be’eri’s Kibbutz in southern Israel. He was taken first, he said, before 20 of his neighbors and friends would have been killed. During the first six weeks of his captivity, Shoham was agreed with obsessive thoughts about his destiny. He said he would alter through different scenarios: that his wife Adi would be dead and that his two children survived, a dead son and the other murdered, or “harder of everything that my wife Adi survived” and the children killed. Then, to end the pain, he said he decided to bury them: “I imagined a great grave and two little ones with my whole community in my town and behind me, and how I gave a speech to each of them. And it was the most difficult thing I did in my life. But I feel that I really need to do it. I actually not only need to not only have that not only have it not only have that not only have that not only have that not only have that not only have it not only to have that not only have it not only had. […] Do it for myself, but in case they are dead, just to let them go. “
Matt Gutman of ABC News interviews Israeli hostages Tal Shoham, who was kept captive by Hamas for more than 500 days.
Hugo Leenhardt/ABC News
A few days later, he said he learned that they had been captive, and that they were among 50 women and children released for a high temporal fire that was reached in November 2023.
After about 30 days in captivity, Shoham said Gilboa-Dalal and Evyatar David were taken to the security house where he was detained. Approximately nine months later, the three were taken underground and they left where they said they were put in a tunnel along with their hostage partner Omer Wenkert, whom Shoham said he was already there.
But for Shoham, 40, worsened a lot. An infection began in his mouth and gums, then pain and inflammation came, the opening of old wounds, then swelling in his legs and the inability to walk, he said. He was prostrated in bed, and his hostage companions joked darkly, “he was a dead man walking.” He said that Hamas captors knocked down a doctor, but could not diagnose the problem, so they gave him antibiotics. Only after Shoham’s release in February, doctors diagnosed him with a disease so common to sailors before the 18th century: advanced scurvy.
Shoham had gone from 179 pounds to 110 pounds during his time in captivity, he said. The four men counted rice grains to make sure they divided equally. Shoham said that his guards told them that they were deliberately hungry so that, after their release, the images of their skeletal frames and sunk faces inflamed the Israeli public and force the Netanyahu government to negotiate an agreement. But Hamas’ plan failed. When the world saw the hostages Eli Sharabi, published on February 8, there was a protest. In the last two weeks of his captivity, Shoham said he and the others were full of food. He had 124 pounds when the Red Cross transported him back to Israel.
The tunnel team foreman would hit them with a lever, Shoham said, abolishing Wenkert’s head, then asked the hostages to massage him and ask them why they don’t love him, a special type of sadism.
The high 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 hostages deceased, the following month. Hundreds of Palestinian prisoners were also released in the hands of Israel.
But there has been a slowdown of the negotiations for the second phase of the agreement, which was to see the Israeli forces completely withdraw from the Gaza Strip; The release of the 59 remaining Israeli male hostages, civilians and soldiers in exchange for an agreed number of prisoners in Israeli prisons and a permanent cessation of military operations and hostilities, authorities said.
