As the freed Israeli hostages begin to open up publicly about their unimaginable ordeal, there seems to be a common theme emerging: Gaza is not innocent. Hamas led the charge, but Israel was attacked by Gaza. The hostages were held not in Hamas prison cells, but inside or underneath the homes of Gazans.

Omer Wenkert was kept underground for most of his captivity, so had less interaction with the supposedly “uninvolved” civilian population, but he did recall being gleefully abused when he was first brought to Gaza tied up in the back of a pickup truck on the morning of October 7, 2023.

“At some point, you reach more populated areas where there are a lot of people. You start seeing lots of people above you, bricks, rods, crowbars and anything that can be used to hit you. And children on shoulders—three-year-old kids on their fathers’ shoulders hitting you,” said Wenkert in an interview with Channel 12 News.

After being take into the Hamas tunnels, the physical abuse continued. “They just hit you like crazy with everything they can find, whether it’s hitting your legs with the barrel of the gun, punching your face, kicking you all over. With each punch you pass out and the next one wakes you up,” he recalled.

His birthday was a particularly memorable day of abuse: “The guard woke me [in a state of] complete madness, insanely aggressively. My birthday gift was being hit in the head with a crowbar. He humiliated me, beat me, he came with a metal rod … and I wished myself first to get through this. I just wished for myself, for my next birthday, not even to be home—just not to get beaten.”

Former hostage Omer Wenkert describes the horrific abuse he endured in captivity: “They just hit you like crazy with everything they can find whether it’s hitting your legs with the barrel of the gun, punching your face, kicking you all over. With each punch you pass out and the… pic.twitter.com/7clq6yeP0a

— Aviva Klompas (@AvivaKlompas) March 11, 2025

The terrorists tasked with guarding Wenkert would abuse and try to humiliate him in different ways, such as forcing him to do hundreds of pushups while they threw food at him that he wasn’t permitted to eat.

“They would come sometimes with bug spray, tell us to go to the end of the room, and spray it on you, on your face, your body, your cutlery, your toothbrush,” he said. “Things like that.”

Wenkert was freed on Feb. 22 as part of the recently-concluded first phase of the current Gaza ceasefire.

Asked if he felt humiliated by the cynical ceremony Hamas put on during his and other hostages’ releases, Wenkert said it was the opposite. “For me it was victory,” he said. “I finished the struggle. It didn’t humiliate me. I fought, and I fought, and I fought—and I won. I had a big smile on my face. I told my mother: ‘I beat captivity.’”

Early in the war, Israel Today interviewed Wenkert’s grandmother, Tzili Wenkert: Experiencing a second Holocaust

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