- Joined
- Mar 11, 2013
- Messages
- 14,867
- Points
- 113
He’s ‘a living skeleton buried alive,’ say David’s relatives after terror group shows him starving, express fear he has only days to live, plead for Trump and world to save hostages
Hostage Evyatar David appeared pale and emaciated in a video that his family approved for publication on Saturday, a day after the Hamas terror group released the shocking footage of him. His family said it showed he was being deliberately starved.
The Hamas footage, more of which was approved by the family for publication in the course of Saturday, includes David speaking in a weak voice, in remarks likely dictated to him by his captors, and shows him digging what he says he fears will be his own grave.
The video was approved for publication as US special envoy Steve Witkoff told hostages’ families that Washington supports a comprehensive Gaza ceasefire-hostage agreement and would no longer seek “piecemeal deals,” and is opposed to expanding the fighting in Gaza. The effort was complicated, he said, but he believed it would ultimately succeed.
Witkoff made the comments during a visit to Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, where hostages’ relatives and hundreds of supporters rallied after Hamas put out the video of David and Palestinian Islamic Jihad published similarly harrowing footage of hostage Rom Braslavski.
Initially on Saturday, David’s family approved for publication a still image from the new footage, which was shared alongside a screenshot from a Hamas propaganda video released in February and a photograph of him before he was kidnapped from the Reim-area Nova music festival during the terror onslaught of October 7, 2023.
It then approved the publication of part of the footage, in which David is seen in a tunnel with a ceiling roughly as high as he is tall, crossing off dates on a calendar on the tunnel’s wall. He is unkempt and unshaven, and appears skeletal even in comparison with the February video, which was filmed during the last ceasefire-hostage deal with Hamas, as Israel increased the flow of aid into Gaza. That deal collapsed in March.
The family later permitted Israeli media to publish the full video.
A still of hostage Evyatar David taken from a Hamas propaganda video (left) next to photos of him in captivity in February (center), and before his capture in 2023. (Hostages and Missing Families Forum)
“Today is July 27, at 12:00 p.m., I don’t know what I’m going to eat,” he says. “I haven’t eaten for a few days in a row.”
I am in a very, very difficult situation, for a long time, for a few months,” he says, describing the lack of food and water, and stating that his captors are giving him what they can.
“This isn’t fiction, this is real,” David adds.
He says his diet consists mainly of some lentils and beans, pointing to the calendar and noting days he has eaten, and several days in a row when he hasn’t received food.
He says he has been in “very, very, very difficult conditions for a very long time, a few months already… You can see how thin I am…”
In the middle of the video, the person behind the camera hands him a can: “This can is for two days. This whole can is for two days so that I don’t die,” David says.
Addressing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, David says he feels, “I have been completely abandoned by you, my prime minister, who is supposed to worry about me and all the prisoners held by the enemy.”
