Eitan Mor also said he had been ready to remain imprisoned longer if it meant Hamas’ destruction.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
In contrast to other former Hamas hostages who said they drew strength from knowing tens of thousands of people demonstrated weekly in Tel Aviv for their release during the War of Revival, Mor said the protests had the opposite effect.
Speaking on The Patriots in a segment aired Saturday night, Mor said he believed the demonstrations harmed Israel.
“I think they did damage to the country,” he told moderator Yinon Magal. “A little past the midpoint of the war, I … was taken into a tunnel and interrogated. Afterward, the officer who interrogated me came to consult with me how they could get more people to attend the Saturday night demonstrations. That’s essentially proof that the protests just served them.”
When Magal asked Mor if the protests had given him hope, he answered, “Not too much…. I thought I’d die there, or I planned to be there for a long time, because I saw the government really wanted to crush Hamas, or at least weaken it significantly. That’s what helped me – to live in the moment, not to have hope.”
Mor was captured at the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, 2023, where he was working as a security guard when terrorists stormed the site.
He helped partygoers escape by telling them how to get away on dirt roads.
Rather than fleeing himself, Mor stayed behind, first to hide the body of a murdered woman so she would not be violated or abducted, and then to reach an area where wounded people were gathered.
When terrorists began shooting at him and Rom Braslavski, the two ran, but Braslavski was captured, Mor said, by “five ‘uninvolved’ people who decided to get involved.”
Braslavski was later freed along with Mor and 18 other hostages who survived captivity after a cease-fire agreement was signed in October.
Mor said he was captured at the same time by eight others “who decided to get involved.”
“They had hammers, saws, knives, saws. They beat me up, I didn’t even try to resist.”
His attackers ranged from people in their 20s to “very young kids, still schoolchildren,” he said.
“The biggest one of them then said to me, in English, ‘Either you die now or go to Gaza,’ and I said ‘To Gaza.’”
They forced him into a car with Hamas terrorists who were “on a high,” Mor said, adding that one took a selfie with him that later became widely circulated, showing Mor giving a thumbs-up.
He said that he made the gesture because he told himself, “I am now going to eat sh** in Gaza, and I’ll deal with whatever happens.”
He also immediately set for himself a goal to learn Arabic, as he knew only about 20 words at the time. He now he speaks fluently, reads and writes in the language.
Of his two years in captivity, Mor said he was alone intermittently for more than a year, moved about 40 times within Gaza City, lived in homes and tunnels, and was treated “reasonably well” most of the time.
He said he was tortured several times, mainly early on. During the first three days, he was chained with his arms behind his back, an experience he described as “a nightmare,” and on another occasion he was electrocuted multiple times with a cable.
Asked why he believed the atrocities of Oct. 7 occurred, Mor said all of Gaza “is programmed to do this, as if in order to free Al-Aqsa,” referring to the mosque on the Temple Mount.
Hamas named its invasion the “Al-Aqsa Flood.”
Asked if he believed Israelis could ever live in peace with Gazans, having been a prisoner of theirs for two years, Mor immediately answered, “There will never be peace with them. They also say this. Several Hamas operatives told me they will carry out another Oct. 7, and that we won’t succeed in destroying them until the last Palestinian in Gaza is killed.”
When asked what the solution might be, he responded, “I hope that our security services will be as obsessive about Hamas as they are about us.”
“In addition, if only we could be united. It doesn’t matter if we are right or left – we must unite against our enemy just as he is united against us. I believe we can do it,” he said, and the audience responded with applause.
Asked about his father, Tzvika Mor, who heads the Tikva Forum of hostage families and argued throughout the war that military pressure — rather than hostage deals releasing thousands of terrorists — was the best way to secure captives’ return, Mor said his father was “fantastic” and a “source of inspiration.”
He “did the most Zionist thing possible,” Mor said, because “Hamas was very strong on Oct. 7. He cared about me, but also about the country. In war there’s nothing else to do. I was also ready to stay there longer, with all the difficulty inherent in that. You have to understand who our enemy is.”
Former hostage says weekly protests in Israel helped Hamas appeared first on World Israel News.