Former Israeli hostage Tal Shoham revealed this week that some of his Hamas captors were not soldiers, but ordinary Palestinians — educators and medical professionals. “One of the guards was a first-grade teacher, another was a lecturer at a university, and another was a doctor. These are normal people becoming terrorists,” Shoham said Monday, according to the Times of Israel.
Shoham, who spent 505 days in captivity after being kidnapped with his family during Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack, described his captors as “so brainwashed and full of hate.” He endured “a lot of torture and cruelty” before being released in February as part of a prisoner exchange. Hamas, under President Donald Trump’s peace deal, freed the final 20 living Israeli hostages Monday in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners.
Shoham also said Hamas terrorists routinely stole humanitarian supplies. “I saw with my own eyes that they stole boxes and boxes and boxes of humanitarian aid from Egypt, from Turkey, from the Emirates, but they didn’t agree to give us any of this food in the tunnels,” he said.
Reports from the Washington Free Beacon confirm that Hamas blurred the line between combatant and civilian during the Oct. 7 massacre. Civilians, including “unarmed teens” and Gazan women, helped abduct Israelis, while “Gazan doctors collaborated with Hamas terrorists to covertly treat kidnapped Israelis and imprison them in hospitals.”
President Trump’s ceasefire deal, praised internationally, ended hostilities after more than a year of conflict, but Shoham’s testimony underscores the extent of Hamas’s civilian complicity in terror.
