Doctors working with children who were hostages held by Hamas after the October 7 massacre of 1200 Israelis are discovering how traumatic the ordeal for the children was and how much it has affected them.
The children seized by Hamas ranged in age from 10 months to 18 years old. Some were held alone. Israeli doctors found that most of the children had lost between 10% to 15% of their body weight, The Wall Street Journal reported.
But the behavior that the doctors found most unsettling was that the children spoke in whispers, slowly gathering the courage to ask if they could look out the window or open a door, Efrat Bron-Harlev, chief executive of the Schneider Children’s Medical Center, said, adding, “They looked like shadows of children.” He said that when the famished children were asked why they ate in such small quantities, they answered they had to save some for later.
“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Renana Eitan, chair of psychiatry at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, said. “We feel as a group that we have to rewrite the textbook.”
Adult hostages who were released back to Israel said the Hamas terrorists who seized the children routinely gave them benzodiazepines and other drugs to keep them quiet; many of the children, now used to the drugs, have trouble sleeping.
Bron-Harley said one three-year-old child kept mentioning “red men.” The doctors finally realized the child was probably speaking of people covered in blood.
Teenagers revealed Hamas told them Israel had been destroyed and no one remembered them. “They did not believe that anyone was looking for them,” Bron-Harlev said.
Some of the children had been told that if they spoke about how bad their conditions were in captivity, Hamas would harm the hostages who were left, so the children were hesitant to speak about what they had experienced, Dr. Itai Pessach, head of pediatric critical care at the Sheba Medical Center’s Edmond and Lily Safra Children’s Hospital, said.
Nigerian psychologist Fatima Akilu, whose organization treated the Chibok schoolgirls kidnapped by the Islamic group Boko Haram in 2014, told the Journal, “What we have found—even if it’s a very short episode of kidnapping—is that they experience long-term psychological distress mostly manifested in the form of trauma. Sometimes you don’t see the effects now but you can see it 10 to 20 years later.”
The children who were hostages are “not coming back to the world they knew,” Pessach said. “Their whole reality has collapsed.”