This chilling new footage from October 7 shows the harrowing moment when an Israeli hostage is forcibly taken through Gaza by armed Hamas militants as a crowd menacingly attempts to lynch him.

Ohad Ben Ami, a father to three daughters from Kibbutz Be’eri, was imprisoned for 491 days in a Gaza tunnel, where he faced deliberate starvation and severe physical and mental abuse.

It was later uncovered that once underground, Ben Ami endured brutal treatment: he was hung upside down by his feet, strangled with rope, and kept in a cramped dark tunnel, where he had to relearn how to walk.

The distressing new video captures the then-55-year-old glimpsing daylight for the last time in over a year, as he is forcibly led through tight streets by Hamas gunmen, surrounded by a mob of shouting civilians.

In additional footage released for the first time by the IDF, Hamas terrorists are seen returning to Kibbutz Be’eri to abduct Ben Ami’s wife, Raz, taking her to Gaza.

A group of plain-clothed militants escorts Raz, dressed in a black and white outfit, on foot through the border fence, where she then endured 54 days in confinement within Hamas’s tunnel network in Gaza.

The shocking video shows the final moments before Ben Ami was trapped 30 metres (100 feet) underground in a space measuring only six square metres (65 square feet) with six other hostages for almost 500 days.

‘We received food twice a day that amounted to 700 calories at best,’ the accountant said after his release, describing how Hamas subjected the hostages to deliberate starvation by giving them only a rotten pita every few days. 

‘Most of our time was spent trying to guess what we would get to eat, when it would happen, whether we would get a whole pita for each person or just half, whether there would also be a cup of rice, [and] whether we got leftovers from our captors,’ he told the Jerusalem Post. 

The hostages were trapped between concrete ‘without air to breathe’, he recalled, describing the dire conditions of captivity.

‘We slept close together on a thin, damp, and wet mattress, with the same blanket that had been used as a sheet for over a year.

‘Insects in the tunnel would get into our noses, mouths, ears, and everywhere else possible.’

He and his cell mates were only allowed to shower once every few weeks in ‘cold, salty water’, and they each wore the same set of clothes the entire time.

Illness was rampant underground, and spread quickly between the hostages, with diarrhea and an upset stomach being common among them due to a lack of medicine.

‘When someone is sick, everyone is sick. Everything was contagious and exhausting because we lost fluids, and there were several cases where we lost consciousness due to high fever.’

Ben Ami and fellow Israeli hostages Or Levy and Eli Sharabi were together subjected to extreme physical torture underground.

 Israel was distraught to discover how the trio were choked, bound, gagged with cloth to the point of suffocation, hung upside down, and burned with a physical object by their captors in Gaza, reported Haaretz.

The hostages were also psychologically taunted by Hamas operatives, who would eat food in front of them, force them to pick which hostages ate and who starved, and even demanded they choose who among their fellow captives who should be killed.

Quoted in the Times of Israel, Ben Ami described the sadistic games Hamas would play on the hostages: 

‘A commander, probably a senior one, came to us and cocked his gun, and said: “Choose three people to die and three people who I will shoot in the kneecap.”

‘They made us decide which three should take a bullet to the head, and which three a bullet to the knee.

‘We had to debate this for an entire hour, all while they filmed us. They let each of us speak and explain why we deserved to live, why we deserved to die, or why we deserved to be shot in the knee.’

When the men failed to volunteer themselves or select any fellow captives for death, Hamas operatives would give them the chance to be pardoned – by forcing them to speak badly about the Israeli government.

The terrorists would show the hostages statements from Israeli politicians and reports of efforts to sabotage the deal, taunting them with phrases like: ‘They don’t want to free you’ or ‘This is how they treat you.’

 After 51 grueling days in captivity, Ben Ami’s wife, Raz, was set free in November 2023.

It wasn’t until February 2025 that Ben-Ami, 56, Levy, 34, and Sharabi, 52, were released, shocking the world with their emaciated bodies.

Health officials took to Hebrew media to report how the three men had suffered malnutrition, decreased muscle mass, heart disorders, and prolonged infection.

On October 7, armed Hamas terrorists killed 101 civilians and 31 security personnel during the massacre at Kibbutz Be’eri.

A further 30 residents and two more civilians were taken hostage.

Ben Ami and his wife have three daughters: Yulie, Natalie, and Ella. On seeing her father for the first time in 491 days, Ella said nothing could have prepared her for seeing the gaunt look of his face and body.

‘What you all saw yesterday on TV, the difficult sight that makes you want to throw the TV to the ground, that’s my father. He endured horrors. We haven’t even begun to hear in-depth about the hell he was in,’ reported Haaretz

‘My father survived as a hero and returned with his head held high,’ she said.

Hamas-led militants killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted 251 others in an attack on October 7, 2023, attack that ignited the war.

They still hold 50 hostages, around 20 of them believed to be alive. Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed more than 61,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.