Netanyahu seeks ICRC’s help after macabre video of starving Israeli captive in Gaza released by Al-Qassam

The Al-Qassam brigades, the military wing of Hamas, released a video on Saturday, August 2, titled: “They eat what we eat”, showing an Israeli captive held in Gaza severely emancipated due to Israel’s longstanding deliberate starvation of the besieged enclave.

In the video, Evyatar David said the date was July 27, stating that he had not eaten for days, and had been living in “a really difficult situation for months”.

The captive recounted his agony, an experience already shared by around two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, from the relative safety of an underground tunnel, which at least spares him from the daily waves of Israeli airstrikes above ground.

“There is not enough food. I barely get enough drinking water. I don’t eat but a little amount of food. Look at me, how slim I became. This is not fiction, this is real,” David said.

“They give me what they can get,” he added, referring to Al-Qassam’s fighters.

David pointed out that he has eaten lentils and beans for weeks, which have not even been available everyday, with no less than two days passing each week without any food.

The starved captive accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of abandoning him, despite his obligation as the head of government to safeguard his welfare alongside the other captives.

“Based on what I was raised to believe in the ‘State of Israel’, the government should care about the captives, and whoever is held in the captivity of the ‘enemy’,” David noted.

“All what I learned and was educated to believe is not true. It was all about lies,” he asserted. 

The video ends with a tragic scene of the skeletal captive digging his own grave, while addressing Israelis: “Every day, time is running out. You are the only ones who can end this”. 

Al-Qassam concluded the macabre video with the sentence: “Only a ceasefire agreement will bring them back alive”.

Witkoff visits to GHF’s centers in Gaza a “publicity stunt”

Hours before the video of David was released, US Special Envoy to “the Middle East” Steve Witkoff, and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee visited the aid distribution sites run by the infamous US-Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

Witkoff claimed that the purpose of the visit was to provide US President Donald Trump with “a clear understanding of the humanitarian situation and help craft a plan to deliver food and medical aid to the people of Gaza”.

For his part, Huckabee stated that he joined Witkoff to learn the truth about GHF’s aid sites, where they “received briefings” from the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), and spoke to “folks” on the ground.

The US diplomat described GHF’s work as an “incredible feat” for allegedly delivering “more than one million meals a day”.

Nevertheless, the visit was widely denounced by Palestinians and others as a “publicity stunt”, because what the two US diplomats claimed they saw did not represent the truth on the ground.

“It was a PR stunt, a controlled visit supervised and dictated by the Israeli military,” Ellie Burgos, an American critical care nurse volunteering at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, told NBC News.“What they saw was not the reality,” she asserted.

Representatives of Gaza’s clans and civic organizations denounced Witkoff’s visit as a “propaganda tour”, which was designed to “sanitize the role of the US and Israel in engineering Gaza’s starvation”. The representative argued that the tour should have included displacement camps, where widespread hunger, disease, and devastation is visibly seen.

“Witkoff should bear witness to the destruction and death toll in Gaza instead of helping whitewash the US-Israeli policy of siege and starvation,” Head of the Higher Committee for Tribal Affairs in the Gaza Strip, Abu Salman Al-Mughni said.

Although the Trump administration has tried to diminish the seriousness of the catastrophic starvation in Gaza, the atrocities and genocide inflicted on Palestinians at GHF aid sites was exposed by retired US army officer, Anthony Aguilar, who was recruited as a security contractor for UG Solutions, a partner of the GHF.

Aguilar told multiple media outlets how the US was complicit in turning these sites, which were built intentionally in the most dangerous parts of Gaza, into death traps for starved Palestinians, where “nonlethal munitions and lethal munitions” were utilized in “unauthorized ways” by US security personnel.

Al-Qassam sets the opening of humanitarian corridors as a condition for providing Israeli captives with food

One day after Al-Qassam’s video was released, Netanyahu’s office requested that the coordinator of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) for the region arrange the delivery of food and aid to Israeli captives held in Gaza.

In response, the spokesman for the Al-Qassam Brigades, Abu Obaida, confirmed in a statement that the Israeli captives “will not receive any special privilege amid the crime of starvation and siege”.

However, he indicated that Hamas is “ready to act positively” and respond to any request from the ICRC to deliver food and medicine to the Israeli captives, provided that humanitarian corridors will be opened “in a normal and permanent manner for the passage of food and medicine” for the entire population across the Gaza Strip.