Former hostage Tal Shoham tells Fox News that from June 2024 until his release on February 22, he was held underground in Gaza by captors who were responsible for digging the tunnels that make up Hamas’s vast underground network in the Palestinian enclave.
He was held in the small underground room along with Omer Wenkert — who was released alongside him — and Evyatar David and Guy Gilboa Dalal, both of whom are still in captivity.
He says that their captors would constantly dig tunnels even as they guarded the four men.
“Hamas never stopped digging tunnels,” Shoham says. “Not for a single day.”
In July 2024, it was reported that Hamas’s tunnel network was still in a “good functional state” despite the many months of war, and the IDF’s attempts to destroy it.
Their captors provided them with just 300 milliliters of water a day, Shoham tells Fox, and they were given plain rice to eat, which resulted in severe malnutrition. After months in which he was getting progressively more unwell due to the diet of just several hundred calories a day, Shoham says a doctor finally came to see him. By that point, he says, he had already developed a severe infection, and had internal bleeding in his legs.
He says the doctor gave him vitamin supplements to combat the malnutrition, which “tasted like dog food, but it dramatically improved our condition.”
Despite the supplements, Shoham was severely underweight upon his release from Gaza.
