🔗 Share this article

The father of a freed Israeli hostage who was made to excavate his personal burial site in a Gazan underground passage has mentioned that his son's well-being is "enhancing every day".

Avishai David was talking after his 24-year son the former hostage and two other liberated captives - Guy Gilboa Dalal and the third hostage - were discharged from medical center to a triumphant return at their residences on Sunday.

"It's hard to describe how joyful it makes me feel to see him returning to his old self," the parent added.

Back in August, eight weeks before the hostage's liberation, the militant group had posted a recording revealing him severely underweight in a narrow concrete underground passage - a move that provoked condemnation from Israeli authorities and numerous Western leaders.

Avishai David stated he was happy to see his son's "strength improving every day, his color coming back [to his face], his facial features getting fuller".

"Thankfully, he survived and he's tough."

The parent stated he had experienced pain for several months conscious that his son was only "80 kilometers away... and there was nothing I could do to help him".

"It destroyed me," he stated, adding that he "couldn't sleep, eat, hydrate adequately."

During August, his sibling the brother had labeled the militant group video as a "new form of inhumanity".

"He resembles a skeleton. He was being deprived of food to the point where he can be dead at any instant, and he suffers a great deal," the brother said at the moment.

Within the recording itself, the hostage stated: "I've gone without food for several days... I scarcely received potable water." He was witnessed digging what he said would be his personal grave.

On Sunday, joyful crowds - comprising several friends and neighbours - welcomed the former hostage as he came back to his home city of the central Israeli city in the center of Israel.

The hospital director, director at the healthcare center where the 3 freed captives were cared for, mentioned their health status still bore the marks of "this terrible imprisonment".

"We can see their medical tests... and we've also heard their stories... they are not fabricating. You can witness the marks of this bodily damage. Their dermis narrates their story. You can see the marks and the wounds."

However the medical professional stated further that the captives "arrived tougher than they were before".

The former hostage was taken from the music event during the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7th, 2023.

The former captive and another 19 surviving hostages have been freed by Hamas under the opening part of a US-brokered halt in fighting arrangement earlier this month.

Hamas has also handed over 15 out of twenty-eight dead hostages. Thirteen were Israelis, a single person was from Nepal and the additional from Thailand.

In exchange, Israel has liberated two hundred fifty Arab inmates and 1,718 individuals from Gaza, and returned fifteen bodies of Arab individuals for every Israeli hostage's remains.

Israeli forces launched a defense campaign in the Gaza Strip in reaction to the 7 October 2023 attack, in which Hamas-led fighters slaughtered about 1,200 persons in southern Israel and seized two hundred fifty-one additional people captive.

In excess of 68,000 individuals people have been deceased by Israeli attacks in Gaza afterwards, according to the militant group-controlled health ministry, whose statistics are seen by the international organization as credible.