Israeli family begs for release of wounded, blinded hostage

Alon Ohel’s family is told he’s starving and seriously injured by shrapnel as freed hostages tell how they were kept chained and repeatedly told, falsely, that they were to be released.

Alon Ohel with his mother Idit. Picture: Channel 12.

The family of a hostage taken to Gaza in Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel has begged for his immediate release after being told he was alive but seriously injured by shrapnel in his eye, shoulder and hand.

Alon Ohel was at the Nova music festival in southern Israel when it was ambushed by Hamas militants 16 months ago.

Mr Ohel, who turns 24 today, is thought to have been captured while sheltering on Route 232, the only path away from the festival along with three other captives including Or Levy, who was released by Hamas on Saturday.

The released hostages told his family he had been wounded in the eye, hand and shoulder with shrapnel, and was blind in one eye. He was held in tunnels, starved and psychologically tortured, as were the three men freed at the weekend.

“After 492 days of uncertainty, we received our first sign of life today – our Alon is alive,” his family said in a statement released by campaign group Hostages and Missing Families Forum.

“He is being held in particularly severe captivity conditions, with serious food shortages,” they added.

“He is wounded and not receiving medical treatment,” the family added. “Alon has survived the horror so far, but he has no time left! The release of the hostages cannot be delayed.”

Mr Ohel’s mother Idit told Israel’s Channel 12 TV: “He was chained the entire time he was in captivity. They had almost no food. How can a mother bear this?”

Alon Ohel was captured from the Nova music festival.

She asked why, with his injuries, he wasn’t included in the first round of hostages to be released.

“What is this selection? How is Alon, in the situation he is in, not considered a humanitarian (case)? How is it that he is not here with me now, together with Eli and Or? I can’t understand it, I will never understand it,” Mrs Ohel said.

Mr Levy was released by Hamas in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza on Saturday with Ohad Ben Ami and Eli Sharabi in the fifth prisoner exchange of its kind as part of an ongoing ceasefire deal.

Images broadcast of the three men’s handover to the Red Cross, in which they appeared frail and gaunt, have been met with anger across Israel.

Mr Levy, 34, had also been attending the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, with his wife Einav Levy who was killed in the attack.

Mr Levy told Israeli media he and the hostages kept with him were starved – often going for days with no food – rarely showered, and had to beg to use the toilet more than once a day.

He said Hamas militants tortured the captives by playing “games” including claiming they would be freed or telling one hostage they would be freed, and another that they would not.

One of Mr Levy’s relatives told Channel 12 the family was “deeply shocked” to hear government sources expressing surprise at the sight of the emaciated hostages.

The relative said the family was told by Israeli officials several months ago that slain Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar had given instructions to starve and abuse the male hostages. They ask: “So how can you claim you did not know?”

Meanwhile a female hostage freed in the current deal says she was kept chained in an airless tunnel by her captors, unable to stand or walk, for almost the entire period she was held hostage, and that she had to learn to walk again when the chains were removed shortly before she was freed.

Channel 12 quotes the unnamed hostage as saying that she was kept “in chains inside a tunnel” for 15 months. “The terrorists kept me in chains inside a tunnel. The tunnel was dark and airless … I could not walk or stand.

“Only close to my release did the terrorists remove the chains, and I learned to walk again,” she said, in testimony the broadcaster described as among the most serious given by any of the hostages so far.