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Human Rights Voices
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.
U.N. Obsession with Condemning
Israel Instead
Danny Elgarat, the brother of slain hostage Itzik Elgarat, speaks during a National Security Committee meeting at the Knesset on March 10, 2025. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
Palestinian Authority/Gaza, August 15, 2025
Autopsy of slain hostage Itzik Elgarat revealed he was tortured to death, brother says
Original source
Israeli hostage Itzik Elgarat was tortured to death by his Hamas captors and did not die of a heart attack during an interrogation as had originally been believed, his brother Danny Elgarat said on Thursday, citing autopsy findings.
Itzik Elgarat, 68, was in his Kibbutz Nir Oz home on the morning of October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists attacked. They shot him through his safe room door, injuring him, and took him captive. He was among 251 people abducted from Israel when the terror group led thousands of gunmen in a devastating invasion of southern Israel that also killed 1,200 people.
In June, Danny Elgarat told lawmakers during a Knesset House Committee that intelligence officials believed his brother had “suffered a heart attack during interrogation under torture.”
But on Thursday, after receiving the results of his older brother’s autopsy, Elgarat said it contradicted the previous version of events.
“Itzik did not die of a heart attack! Today, after my brother’s autopsy, things are clear,” he wrote on X.
“Itzik did not die of a heart attack,” he repeated. “Itzik was tortured to death during an interrogation.”
He said that his brother’s body had been returned to Israel “with numerous broken ribs as a result of external pressure on the chest, with broken toes and a broken nose.”
“Itzik was brutally murdered,” he added.
Elgarat said that the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute, which conducted the autopsy, had been unable to “legally determine the definite cause of death,” but had assessed that the extent of his injuries was severe enough that they “could have caused his death.”...
In June, Elgarat told the Knesset House Committee that Hamas had believed his brother to be an Israeli Air Force pilot because he had a tattoo of an eagle on his arm.
“They took him for interrogation and he never came back,” he said.
The date of Itzik’s death was not clear, although he was known to have been alive until at least January 2024, when, according to intelligence officials, he was moved from Khan Younis to Rafah.
Itzik had been held with Edan Alexander, a US-Israeli IDF soldier who was released from captivity in May 2025 in what was seen as a goodwill gesture by Hamas to US President Donald Trump.
Elgarat told the Knesset committee that Alexander had inquired after Itzik when he failed to return, to which his Hamas captors simply told him: “He’s gone.”
Elgarat’s body was returned by Hamas in February 2025, as part of a ceasefire deal that saw dozens of hostages, dead and alive, returned to Israel. He was buried close to his home in Nir Oz...
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