Omer Wenkert, 23, described on Tuesday the brutal abuse he endured in the Gaza Strip at the hands of his Hamas captors.
“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,” said Wenkert in a televised interview with Israel’s Channel 12 News.
On his birthday his captor had opened the door and awakened him in a state of “complete madness, insanely aggressively,” he recalled. “That was my birthday. [It] was my birthday gift ... I was hit in the head with a crowbar,” he said.
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,” Wenkert continued.
Wenkert survived 505 days in captivity before being freed as part of the Israel-Hamas ceasefire that ended on March 1.
He would be forced to do hundreds of pushups, he recalled, while the captor threw “a block of cheese” in his face, spat on him and did “things like that,” he said.
“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.
Wenkert lost almost half his body weight, was beaten by Gaza mobs and by his captors, and was held in a dungeon alone for hundreds of days, according to Channel 12.
Speaking about the cynical ceremony staged by Hamas for his release, Wenkert said that he had not felt humiliated.
“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.”
He went on to say that when he told his mother that he had beat captivity, “I fully meant it, it was not a cliché.”
Wenkert was kidnapped by Hamas-led terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023, while attending the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im with his good friend Kim Damti, 22, who was murdered during the massacre.
Describing the moments before his abduction, he said that he hid at the festival with dozens of young Israelis in the so-called death shelter, surrounded by terrorists who threw grenades into the small fortified structure and burned them alive.
“It’s terrible to say, but I was busy placing people’s corpses over my head to protect my head if they arrived again to shoot us, or against another grenade. I wanted to keep my head as low as possible, but it gradually became exposed, because with each grenade exploding things moved,” said Wenkert.
At some point around 8 a.m., he accepted his death and decided not to die of fire or suffocation, he said.
“I had a moment of what you might call ‘self respect.’ I said to myself that I was coming to terms with death, that I was ready for it,” he recalled.
Wenkert then got up, stepped through the fire and called out for the attackers to shoot him. But they did not, and when they commanded him to follow them, he realized he was being abducted.
His legs and hands were tied and he was put in the back of a pickup truck.
“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,” he continued.
Wenkert was freed on Feb. 22 as part of the first phase of the Israel-Hamas ceasefire agreement, which included the release of thousands of Palestinian terrorists from Israeli prisons.
The truce formally expired on March 1, but hostilities have not resumed, amid ongoing diplomatic attempts to extend the ceasefire and secure the release of more hostages.
Fifty-nine abductees remain in Gaza, of whom 35 have been confirmed by the Israel Defense Forces to be deceased. Israeli intelligence believes 22 are alive, while the status of two remains uncertain.
