A Hamas commander presented six Israeli hostages huddled in a tunnel in Gaza with a choice: Pick three to be executed and three to be shot in the leg, one of the captives, Segev Kalfon, recalled.
“He pointed a Kalashnikov rifle to my head and asked, ‘Should you be first?’”
Mr. Kalfon said he persuaded the burly commander to spare him.
“But then he wanted to kill my friend,” he added.
For hours, the Palestinian militant toyed with them, before sending them all back to their cell.
After surviving two years in captivity, Mr. Kalfon was finally released on Oct. 13 as part of a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas in which the last 20 living hostages were freed in exchange for 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees.
Mr. Kalfon was among the first to speak openly about his experience. He was abducted on Oct. 7, 2023, when Palestinian militants rampaged through southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and abducting roughly 250 others.
Like many hostages, Mr. Kalfon’s account of his 738 days in captivity included numerous examples of physical and mental abuse. The captors broke his teeth, starved him and pressured him to convert to Islam.
He blames Israeli officials for drawing out his captivity, believing those in power could have acted sooner to hasten his release.
After a far-right Israeli minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, bragged about worsening the conditions for Palestinians in Israeli jails, Mr. Kalfon said that he and other hostages were beaten.
Mr. Kalfon, now 27, spoke to The New York Times as he sat outside a hotel turned into a rehabilitation center near Tel Aviv. Speaking out, he said, is therapeutic.
Many of the details he recounted aligned with what some of the other hostages held with him told Israeli media. Several of them corroborated episodes like the mind games and the beatings they endured as revenge for Mr. Ben-Gvir’s words.
Hamas did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Mr. Kalfon described being deprived of food. During one stretch, he had to make a small can of beans last two days. At times, standing became a struggle.
The last 20 living hostages appeared to be in better condition than the frail captives released earlier in the war. Mr. Kalfon said that Hamas had given them more food in the prelude to their release. A doctor who treated 10 of those returned hostages, Dr. Noya Shilo of Sheba Medical Center, said that they told her that Hamas had given them more food in their final days of captivity.
“The longer people were in captivity, the deeper the damage,” Dr. Shilo said. “They went through horrible abuse,” she added, noting that some of the physical and mental consequences could take years to surface.
Other captives who spoke after they were released also said that they were held in suffocating underground makeshift cells, beaten, and given barely enough food to survive. Some said they were kept in solitude for long periods. Two said they were victims of sexual violence.
Guy Gilboa-Dalal, who was freed on the same day as Mr. Kalfon, told the Israeli channel N12 that on one occasion, after he had showered and was still naked, his captor forcibly touched his body.
For Mr. Kalfon, the second year of captivity was worse. Desperation drove him to devise a dangerous escape plan, he said.
Then he heard his mother, Galit Kalfon, speaking on a radio the hostages had managed to tune to Israeli broadcasts.
“She said she misses me,” he recalled. He abandoned the idea of escaping — hearing her voice, he said, gave him “an ocean of hope” that he would return.
‘Survive Another Day’
On the day of the Oct. 7 attack, Mr. Kalfon said he fled the Nova music festival under a hail of rocket fire from Gaza, sprinting through furrowed fields, bullets whistling overhead. He fell straight into the hands of a group of gunmen in white pickup trucks.
Blindfolded and bound, he repeated the Shema, a Jewish prayer, in his head as his captors beat him ferociously.
“I got to the point where I didn’t feel the blows,” he said.
Before his capture, Mr. Kalfon, from Dimona, in southern Israel, worked in his father’s bakery and as a fiber-optic cable installer. He had recently begun a career as a financial trader.
After being driven into Gaza, he said he was stripped down to his underwear and questioned as one militant held a box cutter to his throat. He was soon joined by two more captives, Yosef-Chaim Ohana and Maxim Herkin. For the next eight months, the three men were held in apartments in central Gaza, hustled from one hide-out to another under Israeli bombardment, Mr. Kalfon said.
He was constantly petrified, fearing that his captors could kill him at any moment, while Israel’s “rain of missiles” was also terrifying, he said.
“All I would think of was how to survive another day,” he recalled.
In that first week, when he asked to use a bathroom, he said a gunman tripped him every step of the way and whipped him repeatedly.
A few days later, an Israeli airstrike blew away the top three floors of the building the hostages were in. The kidnappers threw them clothes and flip-flops to put on, then led them onto the street to the next location.
In total, the three men would stay in about a half-dozen locations, some for as little as a few days and some for a few months. They shared a used toothbrush. Mice scuttled around sometimes, Mr. Kalfon recalled.
He said they were forbidden from talking to each other. Save for a few snatched whispers, Mr. Kalfon said they were silent, “like one tree next to another.”
Gunmen came and went, often ferrying weapons. One played around with live grenades to scare them, Mr. Kalfon said.
On many days, he said all they had to eat was a quarter of a tomato and a shared small bowl of rice.
Despite the widespread food shortages that would grip the Palestinian residents of Gaza because of Israeli restrictions, the hostages’ captors appeared well fed, Mr. Kalfon said. At times, they snacked on large bags of cookies and mixed nuts in front of them, he recalled.
Mr. Kalfon grew thinner as months passed.
In the summer of last year, the three hostages were in a building in Nuseirat, in central Gaza, when fierce fighting erupted outside. The kidnappers locked them into a small bathroom, Mr. Kalfon said.
They embraced and said their goodbyes. They later learned that Israeli commandos had rescued four other hostages in a deadly raid nearby. Days later, their captors took the hostages down into the tunnels, where they would spend the next 16 months.
Under the Ground, ‘Like Ghosts’
The Israelis were led to a tiny space where they joined three other hostages: Bar Kupershtein, Elkana Bohbot and Ohad Ben-Ami, Mr. Kalfon said. Their captors kept watch from about 300 yards away.
The six hostages were given rice with worms, moldy pita and sometimes nothing at all.
Their captors “kept saying that if the people of Gaza above us were hungry, we will also go hungry,” Mr. Kalfon said.
Mr. Kalfon said that they were kept in darkness much of the time but that they were able to talk. The six would tell the same stories again and again — how they were kidnapped and about their lives before the attack. They spoke about food, relaying their families’ recipes as they shriveled, “like ghosts,” Mr. Kalfon said.
After Mr. Ben-Gvir boasted of toughening the conditions of Palestinian security prisoners, Mr. Kalfon said he and others were beaten by their guards as revenge.
“They said it was because of Ben-Gvir,” Mr. Kalfon said.
Mr. Herkin and Mr. Kupershtein similarly described the abuse set off by the Israeli minister’s remarks. In response, Mr. Ben-Gvir said that he was proud of his prison policies and that the news media had adopted Hamas’s narrative.
During the cease-fire in January 2025, their captors summoned the six men for the “execution” game. The hostages refused to choose which three would be killed so the kidnappers drew lots. Mr. Ben-Ami and Mr. Ohana corroborated the account.
A militant known as Hajj, Mr. Kalfon said, appeared to be in charge of the group.
After his release, Mr. Kalfon said he learned Hajj’s identity when Israeli security officials showed him photographs and told him his name was Bayan Abu Nar, the Hamas battalion commander in Nuseirat. Mr. Kalfon also confirmed his identity from a photograph shown to him by The New York Times.
Mr. Abu Nar, who Mr. Kalfon described as a tall, bearded and frightening character, told the hostages that they had been saved from execution because Islam rejected killing prisoners. He pressured the hostages to convert to Islam and brought them a radio to listen to recitations of the Quran, Mr. Kalfon said.
Mr. Kalfon said that he and the other hostages managed to fashion a makeshift antenna to pick up sporadic broadcasts of Israel’s Army Radio, including the interview with Mr. Kalfon’s mother.
Alone With the Commander
After almost a year in the tunnel, Mr. Abu Nar split the group and took Mr. Kalfon and Mr. Ohana to a different tunnel.
Mr. Kalfon, who by then knew more Arabic than his captors realized, said that he eavesdropped on many of Mr. Abu Nar’s calls.
Hamas members were cautious and seemed to speak in code, he said. They typed secret messages on a computer, and saved them to a thumb drive.
One day, Mr. Kalfon recalled, an explosion shook the tunnel. Television images showed the destruction from an airstrike, and Mr. Abu Nar received a call informing him that his wife and several family members had been killed.
“I was scared to death of what he might do to me,” Mr. Kalfon said. But the commander just bowed in prayer.
Mr. Ohana was moved again and Mr. Kalfon remained alone with Mr. Abu Nar for his final 10 weeks in captivity. Mr. Kalfon said that they shared a room and had long conversations, during which the militant admitted that, had Hamas known the consequences of the Oct. 7 attack, they would not have carried it out.
In the days leading to his release, he was moved to another tunnel where he met other hostages. They were given clean clothes and brought above ground to a greenhouse to await the handover.
A Hamas operative played one last mind game.
“You, alone, will be sent back to the tunnel,” Mr. Kalfon recalled the operative saying. “I almost had a stroke on the spot,” Mr. Kalfon said.
Less than an hour later, he was handed over to the Red Cross and driven to the Israeli border.
Mr. Kalfon said he now appreciates every little thing in life, “even drinking a glass of clean water.”
While he knows that many in Israel hoped for his return, he said, he is angry that the government took two years to secure his freedom.
“Why did it take so long?” he asked. “Why did they let us go through all of this?”
Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting from London.
Natan Odenheimer is a Times reporter in Jerusalem, covering Israeli and Palestinian affairs.
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