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While the UN devotes its human rights operations to the demonization of the democratic state of Israel above all others and condemns the United States more often than the vast majority of non-democracies around the world, the voices of real victims around the world must be heard.
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Former Hamas hostage Maya Regev in an interview with Channel 12 news, July 27, 2024. (Screenshot)
Palestinian Authority/Gaza, July 28, 2024
‘They’d purposely cause pain’: Ex-hostage describes cruel treatment by Gazan doctors
Original source
Former Hamas hostage Maya Regev on Saturday shed light on the cruelty of Palestinian doctors who treated her after she was shot in the leg and kidnapped on October 7, in a tearful interview sitting alongside the mother of her friend who has been held in Gaza for almost 10 months.
“They would really hurt me,” she told Channel 12 news. “When changing bandages, when they wanted to see the wounds, they would purposely cause pain. [The doctor] would take chlorine, alcohol, and sometimes even something like apple cider vinegar, and would pour it in [the wound] and apply pressure.”
Regev, 21, was abducted along with her brother Itay, 19, and their friends Omer-Shem Tov and Ori Danino from the Supernova music festival on October 7, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists burst across the border into Israel, murdering some 1,200 people and seizing 251 hostages, mostly civilians, many amid acts of brutality and sexual assault.
At the music festival, terrorists massacred 364 people, gang-raped others, and abducted dozens to Gaza, among them the Regevs, who were both shot in the legs as they tried to escape the carnage.
The siblings were among 105 civilians released during a week-long truce in late November, after weeks of captivity in Gaza.
In the interview, Regev said that, one day, the doctor took a small knife and started cutting into her exposed flesh in the wound, ignoring her pleas to stop.
“I wanted to kick him in the face, but he had a pistol and I had nothing, so I shut up,” she said, adding that she had feared at one point that the physicians were going to amputate her leg.
“When they were changing my bandages they would give me ketamine and pethidine intravenously so that I wouldn’t scream. But they’re not really pain relievers, they’re muscle relaxants. So I couldn’t respond, but I could feel everything,” she said during the interview.
Asked how she managed to get through the ordeal, Regev responded, “I had two options. I could lay on my mattress and cry about how I missed my parents and cry about being shot and cry about being in captivity and be a victim. Or I could pull myself up and fight. And I think in the end, that’s what saved me.”
Regev recalled that on October 12, five days after they were kidnapped, she managed to convince her captors to bring in Itay and their friend Omer, who remains in captivity, and whose mother, Shelly Shem-Tov, joined the Channel 12 interview, to be with her for the bandage-changing.
Regev described how Omer cared for her, calmed her down, and held her mouth so she would not scream, which she had been forbidden to do.
“That’s just so ‘Omer,'” Shelly said as Regev told the story, both women laughing and crying at the same time.
Regev said that was the last time she saw Omer. Since their release, she and Itay have been in close contact with his family and said they have all joined the campaign calling for the release of Omer and the rest of the hostages.
“Omer is alive, and he must return home,” Shelly said.
The two describe meeting in the initial days after Regev and her brother were released from Gaza, while the two were being treated in Beersheba’s Soroka Medical Center.
“It was an incredibly powerful meeting. We all cried together… It was the closest we could be to Omer. To see them, to hear what he went through, what they went through,” Shelly said.
Regev’s brother Itay has also shared details of the cruelty he endured during his medical treatment in Gaza, telling the BBC in March that a bullet was pulled from his leg in an operation without anesthesia, while captors abused and threatened to kill him if he made any noise.
Regev said that she returned from Gaza with many infections, a fungus growing inside her bone, and other signs of medical negligence. Even eight months after her release, her road to recovery remains long.
She said that at the top of the list of things she wants to do is to walk on two legs again, but that with every additional surgery, that dream seems to get farther away. She is in physical therapy and said that she will need to learn to walk again.
This past week, she underwent another two surgeries on her leg, the same week that Shelly traveled to the US with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in an effort to increase pressure on the government and the Biden administration to secure a deal to see her son’s release.
Efforts to close a hostage-ceasefire agreement appeared to be progressing on Sunday, with Mossad director David Barnea in Rome to meet with top negotiators from the US, Egypt, and Qatar for talks on the updated proposal for a deal with Hamas that Israel relayed to the White House on Saturday.
It is believed that 111 of the 251 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza, including the bodies of 39 confirmed dead by the IDF.
Four hostages were released by Hamas before the November hostage deal that saw the release of the Regev siblings, seven hostages were rescued by troops alive, and the bodies of 24 hostages were also recovered, including three abductees mistakenly killed by the military as they tried to escape their captors.
One more person has been listed as missing since October 7, and their fate is still unknown.
Hamas is also holding two Israeli civilians who entered the Strip in 2014 and 2015, as well as the bodies of two IDF soldiers who were killed in 2014.
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