The sickening horrors endured by Hamas’ terrified hostages: How kidnapped Israeli women and children were drugged, starved, shot and threatened with violence if they spoke while held in ‘inferno’ before finally being released after 49 days

They stumbled through the darkness of the hurriedly-dug tunnels underneath Gaza City, wondering if they’d ever see their loved ones again. 

Elderly women, young mothers and frightened children were taken and used as gambling chips to further the cause of a terror group that killed 1,300 Israelis on October 7, the single deadliest day in the Jewish nation’s history. 

For weeks, they were starved, beaten, drugged, branded and made to watch footage of Hamas terrorists invading their homeland with weapons pointed to their heads, until the moment was right for the terror group.  

In exchange for four days of precarious ceasefire, the release of 150 Palestinian women and children from Israeli prisons, and the permission for at least 200 aid trucks to enter Gaza each day, Hamas promised to release at least 50 prisoners it had taken in the midst of chaos and spilled blood. 

The deal was open-ended, and allowed for additional days of ceasefire to be agreed in exchange for additional hostages. 

Hamas, desperate for a brief respite from the war that has already killed at least 15,000 of its civilians in Gaza, according to figures deemed trustworthy by the UN, made the most of the extensions, releasing a total of 105 hostages as of this weekend. 

Just over 100, hailing from all corners of the globe, remain in the dark, musty tunnels beneath Gaza, as Israel and Hamas once again hurl fire and brimstone at each other, eight weeks into the deadliest war between the two in decades. 

The families of those who are still held by Hamas are terrified for their safety and wellbeing, both mental and physical.

The testimonies of those who have already been released is doing little to abate these fears.

Relatives of recently-released hostages who have taken care of them in the days and weeks since their release have slowly begun revealing to the world just how badly they were treated by Hamas.  

Yagil and Or Yaakov, aged 12 and 16 respectively, were handed back to their families last Monday, after being captured along with their father Yair Yaakov and his partner Meirav Tal, both of who are still thought to be in captivity, from their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz. 

Their uncle, Yaniv, revealed that the two young boys were branded to make sure they were identifiable if they ran away. 

‘Hamas took the leg of each child and stuck it in on a motorcycle tail pipe to make a mark in case they escape, so they could find them,’ he said this week.

‘They were drugged, they were treated so bad, but at least they are with us.’ 

The terrorists treated Mia Schem, a young 21-year-old taken from the Nova festival, with a little more care. 

Her aunt, Vivian Hadar, revealed that a veterinarian operated on her badly injured hand, which was shot while she was raving with her friends on October 7. 

She said that the treatment was a bodge job, and has stayed very quiet about her weeks underground.

‘She isn’t telling much,’ Hadar said, adding that the moment relatives started asking questions, ‘we saw that it was very hard for her.’

It’s not clear whether this lack of resources was real or artificial to weaken the hostages. But other survivors have revealed that they subsisted on paltry meals for weeks as they were held. 

An aunt of Abigal Idan, an American-Israeli citizen who was taken hostage after she was orphaned during Hamas’ incursion, and who turned 4 a few days before being released, said her young niece shared just one piece of pita bread with some za’aatar, a Middle Eastern spice mix, with four other captives each day. 

She and the four other captives she was with did not bathe once during their 50 days as hostages, and were kept in a series of above-ground flats. 

As a result of a lack of washing, Abigail developed a significant case of lice, and her head was shorn off.

‘She was covered in it. It took quite an effort to help her get rid of some of it the first night,’ her aunt told the New York Times. 

Even as they held back food, water and news from the hostages, Hamas made them act out propaganda that benefited its image. 

Danielle Aloni, who was held along with her six-year-old daughter Emily, reportedly penned a letter that was published by Hamas while she was a hostage that claimed they were both fine and being treated well. 

She praised the terrorists for their ‘extraordinary humanity’ towards her daughter.

 ‘Kids shouldn’t be in prison, but thanks to you and other kind people we met along the way… My daughter considered herself a queen in Gaza,’ the letter, which was published in Hebrew and Arabic, read.

It is not clear if Danielle wrote the note of her own free will, or if she was forced to pen the gushing tribute – which also said she would ‘always be captive to gratitude’ because her daughter did not leave captivity with ‘psychological shock.’

Her family quickly rebuked the letter, with one of her cousins’ writing shortly after the letter was published: ‘Hamas just published more propaganda of my family.’

Danielle later said in an interview: ‘Our girl saw things that children at this age or any age should not see. 

‘It was a horror movie.’

Other parents of hostages agreed with Danielle in saying that children should not have been subjected the horrors that lay waiting for them beneath Gaza.  

Thomas Hand, the father of Emily, who turned nine as she was held by Hamas, stunned the world when he said he was glad his daughter was dead, and not in the hands of the terror group. 

But his world was changed when Israeli officials told him their intelligence was wrong, and that she was alive. 

Emily and her friend Rotem Shoshani, 13, were kept above ground in a home in northern Gaza, in comparatively luxury. 

But that would’ve done little to make up for the horrors seen at Kibbutz Be’eri, the site of the worst settlement massacre, where at least 130 people were slaughtered in their homes.

 Sickening photos of the aftermath of the Be’eri kibbutz massacre revealed that Israeli civilians were killed in their bedrooms in the first hours of Hamas’ surprise attack.

Almost all of the photos, passed on to MailOnline by the Israeli Embassy in London, were too graphic to share publicly, and depicted several dead bodies strewn across a small room in the community of around 1,000 people near the border with Gaza.

The photos were some of the clearest representations of exactly what happened in the settlement. 

On top of the horrors the young pair witnessed in their homes, Emily saw a man get shot to death while she was held in Gaza, her sister Natali Hand revealed. 

Natali added that the pair were left despondent, as they were not told of their releases until the last moment. 

The testimonies of the released survivors has pushed the world into finding more of them before Hamas can exploit them further. 

The RAF is set to conduct ‘unarmed surveillance flights’ over the Middle East in a bid to find locations where Hamas are keeping kidnapped civilian hostages.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) confirmed on Saturday that ministers had been working with allies in the region to ‘secure the release of hostages’, including British nationals.

Fighting resumed between Israel and Hamas on Friday after a week-long truce, despite more than 130 hostages remaining in captivity in the Gaza Strip.

In the weeks after Hamas’s bloody October 7 raids on Israel, Downing Street said at least 12 British nationals had been killed in the attack and a further five are still missing.

Some of those are believed to have been kidnapped but the UK Government has not confirmed how many might be in Hamas’s clutches.

In a statement published on the Government website, the MoD said: ‘The safety of British nationals is our utmost priority.

‘In support of the ongoing hostage rescue activity, the UK Ministry of Defence will conduct surveillance flights over the eastern Mediterranean, including operating in air space over Israel and Gaza.

‘Surveillance aircraft will be unarmed, do not have a combat role, and will be tasked solely to locate hostages.

‘Only information relating to hostage rescue will be passed to the relevant authorities responsible for hostage rescue.’

MoD officials said a range of unarmed aircraft would be used for the reconnaissance flights, including Shadow R1s which are used for intelligence gathering by the Royal Air Force (RAF).

Information on the potential whereabouts of captives will be shared with Israel.