As he underscored the need to recover the remaining 50 hostages, of whom only 20 are believed to still be alive, released captive Ohad Ben Ami told politicians in the Knesset on Tuesday that his captors had forced him and other hostages to choose which of their number should be sentenced to death.
Ben Ami, who was kidnapped from his home in Kibbutz Be’eri during the Hamas
..the well-beloved offspring of the Moslem Brotherhood,...onslaught of October 7, 2023, and was released from captivity in February 2025, recounted his experience during a Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee session.
He told the committee that about a month before his release, he was rounded up along with five of his fellow hostages and told by a Hamas operative that three of them would be sentenced to death, and that it was up to them to decide who it would be.
"A commander, probably a senior one, came to us and cocked his gun, and said: ’Choose three people to die and three people who I will shoot in the kneecap,'" Ben Ami said. "They made us decide which three should take a bullet to the head, and which three a bullet to the knee."
"We had to debate this for an entire hour, all while they filmed us," he recalled. "They let each of us speak and explain why we deserved to live, why we deserved to die, or why we deserved to be shot in the knee."
He said that once the hour was up, and nobody had volunteered themselves or their fellow captives to be selected for death or life, their captors simply picked which three would be sentenced to death at random.
"And then they told us, before we shoot you, you have the opportunity to perhaps be spared."
In an attempt to spare themselves from the death sentence
...the barbaric practice of sentencing a murderer to be punished for as long as his/her/its victim is dead...
, the three hostages were forced to speak badly about the Israeli government, among other subjects, Ben Ami said. After they were finished speaking, he said, the Hamas official made a show of having "pardoned" them and sent the six men away.
"You sit there and think to yourself, ’What just happened here?'" Ben Ami told the committee, explaining that the hostages constantly exist in "a state of extreme fear."
"Understand that this is what it’s like, this is how we lived our lives every day," he stressed. "On top of everything else, unexpected things happen, and it’s insane to think about it."