Israeli Hostage Delivers Jaw-Dropping Account of His 2 Years of Captivity By Hamas: ‘Mental Abuse

CNN

Evyatar David was among the Nova music festival attendees taken hostage by Hamas in October 2023.

David spent 783 days in captivity in Gaza. Before his release in 2025, he was featured in a video shared by Hamas that showed him digging his own grave — an experience that he said was “almost impossible.”

David recounted the ordeal in a conversation with CNN that was published Wednesday.

“So yes, one day before the video, so the commander went inside our tunnel, and he just took a picture of my body and another guy’s body,” David said of the time preceding the filming of the video.

“And he saw I look worse than him, so they decided to take me for the video … I’ll be the actor of the video,” he continued. “And, again, everything you see there … the paper with all the days … what I eat, what I don’t eat, what I eat … it’s all staged, but it relies on the truth, because we didn’t eat for three months; we were in extreme starvation.”

“We were in starvation all the captivity, but specifically on those three months, it was the worst,” he clarified.

David said:

“Everything I’m saying there and doing, they tell me what to do … but of course, how you can see my body, it’s only through … I could barely move, could barely do anything. When I tried to dig the grave, just to hold the shovel, it was almost impossible … probably the hardest physical thing [I] ever did.”

The interview is David’s first with international media since he was released. David and his friend, Guy Gilboa Dalal, were taken hostage from the Nova festival; two of their friends were killed in the surprise attack.

“It was really like a mental abuse all those three months, and this specific day with the video, even when they’re telling me to go with them for the grave, when they wanted me to dig, they took me [on a] 50-meter walk,” he also said.

“For me, it was almost — I almost collapsed,” he added. “It was almost impossible for me to do. And I’m telling them that it’s very hard, but they didn’t really listen, didn’t really care, and also, when they take me inside their room, the tourist room, I can hear them laughing and eating cakes and drinking tea like there’s no person that walks next to them [that] looks like a skeleton.”

Watch the above via CNN.

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