Hamas Offered Starving Hostages More Food If They Converted to Islam — and They Refused

Hamas offered starving hostages more food if they converted to Islam — and they refused, according to statements by families of some of the 20 living hostages who were returned to Israel earlier this week.

Hamas is an Islamist terrorist group whose ambitions extend beyond destroying Israel, and include converting the entire world to Islam by force. The name Hamas is an acronym, in Arabic, of the words “Islamic Resistance Movement” — a fact often overlooked by pro-Palestinian activists in the West.

Families of the hostages, returned in U.S. President Donald Trump’s ceasefire deal, had described Hamas’s attempts to convert their relatives in captivity — and the heroic efforts of the starving hostages to resist:

The hostages also endured psychological terror. [Rom] Braslavski’s mother said his captors pressured him to convert to Islam, offering him extra food and better conditions, but he resisted. They also told him, falsely, that Israelis were too weak or uninterested to protest on his behalf, while inflating the IDF’s death toll and the damage inflicted on Israel.

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[Yosef-Haim] Ohana and another hostage were also made to listen to Muslim religious messages via a radio, his father said — a situation they managed to turn to their advantage. By playing with the radio’s wires, he said, they were able to tune into Israeli army radio, where Ohana heard his father being interviewed.

“He said to himself, ‘My father is alive! He is waiting for me!’ and it gave him new life,” the rabbi shared.

On Thursday, another freed hostage, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier Matan Angrest, attended the funeral of his colleague, tank commander Cpt. Daniel Perez, who was killed by Hamas on October 7 and whose body had been taken to Gaza.

Angerest, the only survivor of the tank unit, praised his commander and said he was prepared, barely three days after being freed, to return to Gaza to fight for the return of the remains of the remaining dead hostages, the Times of Israel reported.

Hamas promised to return the remains of 28 hostages; it has only returned 11, and one body returned to Israel turned out to be that of a dead Palestinian.