Israeli hostage Segev Kalfon, who was abducted by Hamas terrorists from the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, 2023, said his captors beat him brutally for refusing to change his name and forced him to live underground in Gaza for months under constant threat of death.
Kalfon, 27, was held for 738 days before being freed earlier this month. Speaking to Ynet and Yedioth Ahronoth, he described how the terrorists mocked and assaulted him after he introduced himself as “Segev” — a name that sounded to them like the Arabic word for “ceiling.”
“They didn’t believe me and started beating me,” he said. “When they began calling me ‘Steve,’ I stopped correcting them. That’s when I realized I was a prisoner.”
Kalfon said he was thrown into what he believed was a mosque upon arrival in Gaza. “Someone pressed a knife to my neck and asked my name. I said ‘Segev.’ He pressed harder. Every time I said it, I was beaten again,” he recalled.
After being captured while fleeing the Nova festival, Kalfon said he was tied up, blindfolded, and beaten with rifle butts. “They hit me in the knees, the stomach, the head, from every side. After a few minutes, you stop feeling the blows — only silence, a minute before life ends,” he said.
He was later moved between safe houses under heavy Israeli bombardments before being held in a tunnel for 11 months with several other hostages — Ohad Ben Ami, Elkana Bohbot, Yosef Chaim Ohana, Maxim Harkin, and Bar Kuperstein. For long stretches, he was kept alone.
“We dug a pit for a toilet — for us and for them — because they called us ‘worthless Jews,’” he said. “We dug tunnels. They forced us to work. When you go down into a tunnel, you become a rat. The life you had above ground no longer exists.”
Kalfon said he refused to take part in a Hamas propaganda video. “I thought about my parents and my family,” he said. “I didn’t want to say that I was suffering or starving, or that a tunnel collapsed on me. Even though every day there was a danger to your life, every minute you survived was a miracle.”
At one point, he said, bombings were so close that he and two fellow hostages said their goodbyes, believing they would die. “We said to each other, ‘If something happens, know that I love you, that you’re my brothers.’ After that day they took us down into the tunnel.”
“Death becomes your best friend,” Kalfon said. “You talk to death all the time. Nothing is certain. You have no food, no communication, and they do everything to make you suffer.”
He said the hostages were beaten whenever the terrorists saw National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir on television or heard about Hamas prisoners in Israeli jails. “We knew the light at the end of the tunnel meant beatings were coming,” he said.
Kalfon described life underground as unbearable. “You sleep on an uneven floor, on a mattress as thin as a sheet. I made a pillow from scraps of mattress. The little water we had, I filtered through gauze. A bottle of water was like gold,” he said. “Today, nothing is taken for granted.”