Two weeks after his release from Gaza, Yosef Chaim Ochana broke his silence, recounting the horror he endured and the desperate tactics he used to survive during his captivity. Speaking with Channel 12 on Monday, he described the moments when his life hung by a thread and how he managed to persuade his captors not to execute him.
“In the first place where I was kept, suddenly someone came into the room, angry, cocked his pistol, and put it to my head. ‘Tell me how many people you have killed, now I will kill you.’ I reply: ‘Zero, zero.’ Then he says, ‘Eh, you’re also lying to me,’ and was about to shoot me. At that point, some shiekh walks in, pulls him by the hand, and tells him, ‘Not now,'” Ochana recounted.
He recalled that the terrorists would intentionally torment them psychologically. “There were times that it was planned; they wanted to make us anxious. They sat us down and told us: ‘Your country did so and so, now we are taking revenge.’ They made us choose between each other, who to kill, who to just wound, they drew lots on us.”
Ochana described how simple greetings often turned into brutal assaults. “Once, they came, we said hello, and they suddenly began beating us. They were ordered to begin hitting us. They faced us against a wall, took off our shirts, and beat us. Since then, we would call it ‘the flashlights are coming.’ Every time we saw flashlights, we would have a panic attack. No one knew what to do; ‘Should I stand?’ ‘Should I sit?’ ‘Who will be the first to get it?’ We wanted to run as far in as possible, but then we understood that it won’t look good and that we need to spread out across the room. We preferred that they wouldn’t come for a week, two weeks, a month; that they would leave us alone.”
When faced with the threat of execution, Ochana said he appealed to their logic, hoping to convince them of his value alive. “At that point, I knew them, and I knew what was important to them, why they abducted me, and that the very fact that I was a hostage made me an ‘important bargaining chip.’ I told them, ‘What, now you’ll take revenge on me so that your citizens will be happy, but what about the prisoners waiting to be released in return for me from prison, to leave and see their families? If I die, they’ll release fewer prisoners.'”
{Matzav.com}
He definitely an angel watching over him, and so did all those who were released alive.