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Some of the Hamas terrorists who guarded the hostages in Gaza were teachers, university professors and even doctors who had been radicalized, a former Israeli captive said.
In the wake of this week’s hostage release, Tal Shoham — who was among the hostages freed in February — relived his 500 days of captivity under Hamas, forcing him to contend with just how deep-rooted the hatred for the Jewish state had grown in Gaza over the two years of war.
Shoham claimed that Hamas’ influence had grown to the point where many of the men working for the group were “not soldiers,” but instead everyday civilians who had been “brainwashed” by the terror group.
“One of the guards was a first-grade teacher, another was a lecturer at a university, and another was a doctor,” Shoham told the Times of Israel. “These are normal people becoming terrorists.”
The former captive claimed there was rarely any order within Hamas’ structure, with the terror group’s guards varying from extremists looking to hurt anyone to religious men who looked after the hostages’ well-being.
Shoham claimed Hamas’ popularity in Gaza attracted those who wanted to enact all kinds of “sadistic thoughts and actions not just against Israelis, but also Gazans.”
He recalled one incident where a Hamas operative shot a Palestinian man in the knees simply because he “looked suspicious.”
Shoham also watched as the injured man was executed while being attended to by an ambulance simply because Hamas “decided that he should die.”
Moments of humanity among the terror group were “very rare,” Shahom told the local outlet, recounting the time some of the guards smuggled in extra food for him along with a message from his wife.
While the captors were committed to sticking to the tenets of Islam, Shahom claimed many of the guards were not religious and only joined Hamas because “this is the popular thing to do.”
Despite Israel’s last estimation earlier this year that it has killed more than 20,000 Hamas fighters, the terror group has boasted that it has been able to repeatedly replenish its ranks.
Former US officials and analysts have warned that Hamas has been able to recruit a wide range of new members through the promise of revenge and food in the war-torn Palestinian enclave.
Shahom noted that Hamas would celebrate whenever it looted humanitarian aid arriving in Gaza, boasting about its resources while the hostages and other Palestinians went hungry.
“I saw with my own eyes that they stole boxes and boxes and boxes of humanitarian aid from Egypt, from Turkey, from the Emirates, but they didn’t agree to give us any of this food in the tunnels,” he said.
