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Hamas has released a propaganda video showing a severely emaciated Israeli hostage being held in what appears to be an underground tunnel in Gaza, the first video of its kind in months.
Evyatar David, 24, was kidnapped at the Nova Music Festival on Oct. 7, 2023, during the terrorist attack by Hamas in which 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage.
The video shows David looking visibly gaunt as he ticks off days on a calendar in a narrow tunnel. Another section of the video shows him being forced to dig a hole in the ground that he says will be his grave.
The Hamas propaganda video is interspersed with images of starving Palestinian children.
David, a guitar and piano player who comes from a musical family, is one of an estimated 20 living hostages still being held by Hamas and other militants. Of the estimated 250 people taken during the Hamas terror attack on October 7, 140 have been released during negotiations, 8 have been rescued, and the bodies of 57 who died in captivity or during rescue attempts have been recovered.
Read More: The Tragedy Unfolding in Gaza
David’s family, who asked for the video not to be published, said in a statement that he had been “deliberately and cynically starved in Hamas’s tunnels in Gaza,” describing him as “a living skeleton, buried alive.”
“The deliberate starvation of our son as part of a propaganda campaign is one of the most horrifying acts the world has seen. He is being starved purely to serve Hamas’s propaganda,” they added.
The video release comes a day after Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another militant group with ties to Hamas, also released a video of another Israeli hostage, Rom Braslavski.
President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff met with the families of the hostages in Tel Aviv on Saturday, where he told them that Trump and he believe they will be “successful” in negotiating a deal to bring all of the hostages home.
“Now we have to get all the 20 [live hostages] at the same time... we think that we have to shift this negotiation to all or nothing so that everybody comes home. We think it is going to be successful and we have a plan around it,” Witkoff said, according to Axios. “President Trump now believes that everybody ought to come home at once - no piecemeal deals. That doesn't work.”
Ceasefire talks have continued to stall between Hamas and Israel as a starvation crisis spreads in Gaza, with a United Nations (UN)-backed international food security body warning that there is a “worst-case famine scenario” unfolding in the region.
Read more: The Malnutrition Crisis in Gaza Will Outlive the War
The UN said this week that humanitarian access to Gaza “remains severely restricted,” and the UN World Food Programme (WFP) director of emergencies said the level of starvation was “unlike anything we have seen in this century.” It added that Israel is now allowing “humanitarian pauses” with more than 100 aid trucks allowed to enter Gaza on Sunday.
Witkoff and the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, visited an aid site in Gaza run by the controversial Israel and U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) on Friday, as the United Nations said that over 1,373 Palestinians have been killed while seeking food since the end of May, including 859 at GHF sites.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in response that reports of civilian casualties near distribution sites are under review.
“The IDF allows the American civilian organization (GHF) to operate independently in distributing aid to the residents of Gaza, and operates in proximity to the new distribution areas in order to enable the orderly delivery of food,” it said in a statement to TIME.
“IDF forces are conducting systematic review processes in order to improve the operational response in the area and minimize, as much as possible, any friction between the civilian population and IDF forces,” it continued.
