Israeli hostage Ivyatar David, forced to dig his own grave, freed, father says

The father of an Israeli hostage forced by Hamas to dig his own grave in the Gazan tunnels told the BBC his son’s condition was “improving every day”.

Avishai David was speaking after his 24-year-old son Iviatar David and two freed hostages, Guy Gilboa Dalal and Ethan Mor, were released from hospital to a hero’s welcome at his home on Sunday.

“I can’t tell you how happy I am to see him back to his old self,” the father added.

In August, two months before Iviatar’s release, Hamas posted a video showing him languishing in a narrow concrete tunnel – a move that drew condemnation from Israel and many Western leaders.

Avishai David told the BBC he was delighted to see his son’s “vitality improving day by day, his color coming back (to his face), his cheeks filling out”.

“Thank God, he pulled through and is strong.”

The father said his son was only “80km away… and suffered for months knowing I couldn’t help him”.

“He devastated me,” he said, “he couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t eat, he couldn’t drink.”

In August, Eviatar’s brother Ile told the BBC that the Hamas video was a “new form of brutality”.

“He is a human skeleton. He was so starved that he could die at any moment, and he suffered a lot,” Ile said at the time.

In the footage itself, Iviatar said: “I haven’t eaten for days… I haven’t even had water to drink.” He was seen digging what he said would be his own grave.

On Sunday, a cheering crowd – including many friends and neighbors – greeted Ivyatar David upon his return to his hometown of Kfar Saba in central Israel.

Dr Michal Shteinman, director of the Rabin Medical Center, told the BBC that his body still bore the marks of “this terrible captivity”.

“We can see their blood tests… and we’ve heard their stories… they don’t lie. You can see the signs of this metabolic injury. Their skin tells their story. You can see the scars and the bruises.”

But Dr. Shteinman added that the hostages “came back stronger than they were”.

On October 7, 2023, Iviatar was kidnapped from the Nova music festival during a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel.

Hamas freed him and 19 other surviving hostages in the first phase of a US-brokered ceasefire deal earlier this month.

Hamas has also exchanged 15 of the 28 dead hostages. Thirteen were Israelis, one Nepalese and the other Thai.

In return, Israel has released 250 Palestinian prisoners and 1,718 prisoners from Gaza and returned the bodies of 15 Palestinians for every Israeli hostage’s remains.

The IDF launched a military campaign in Gaza in response to the October 7, 2023 attack, in which Hamas-led gunmen killed around 1,200 people and took 251 others hostage in southern Israel.

More than 68,000 people have been killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza since then, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures are deemed reliable by the United Nations.