60 feet underground in a 3-foot-wide tomb: Freed Israeli hostage details conditions of Hamas captivity: Reporter's notebook

Editor's note: This reporting contains graphic descriptions.

GAZA -- The fighting may have stopped, but not Hamas' digging.

Every day from 5 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week, the team that guarded Israeli hostage Tal Shoham used a type of electric demolition hammer to carve additional miles of tunnel from the soft Gaza clay, he said. The former hostage, released last month in the first phase of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, recalled that the digging teams rotated in nine-hour shifts. In the 17 months since the terrorist organization launched its surprise rampage through Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas appears to have survived Israel's withering bombing campaigns through the ceaseless expansion of its vast web of tunnels that honeycomb underneath Gaza and has come to be known by Israeli officials as "the Metro."

Shoham said he and three others were kept in a 120-square-foot tunnel shaft for more than 200 days, nearly half of the total 505 days he was held captive by Hamas. To get there, he told me he was led on a two-and-a-half hour walk through "the metro," shocked at its labyrinthine sprawl beneath the Gaza Strip. He said the main line of the metro -- which Shoham says Hamas told him connects northern and southern Gaza -- is likely still intact, and every day teams dig new branches and shafts to the surface. His Hamas captors said you could walk for five days from Gaza City in the north to Rafah in the south, according to Shoham. He said Hamas was very proud of the work.

On about day 300 into his time as a hostage of Hamas, Shoham said he was dressed like a Gazan man, walked out of the safe house where he'd been kept and led on a meandering walk through Gaza's streets to meet an ambulance, which then ferried him into a tunnel structure. Shoham was then blindfolded and said he descended into an underground space. He said his captors then removed his blindfold and he had to duck low to get into the first level, where, looking up, he saw what he described as a huge improvised explosive device that he said his captors told him was meant to collapse the tunnel should the Israel Defense Forces enter it.

As he descended further, he said, the air smothered him -- damp, dank and yet thin, as if at altitude. He had been told he was going to a doctor, but instead was introduced to hell, he said: a 50-foot long, 3-foot wide tunnel 60 feet underground where there were three other men. The four of them slept (head to toe), defecated and nursed the wounds of their beatings there for nearly a year. At one point, Shoham said they were given a deck of cards, but could only play two at a time because the tunnel was too narrow for the four of them to sit in a circle. It took Shoham a month to acclimatize to the lack of oxygen, and much longer to the claustrophobia of living in the coffin-wide tube, he said. The smell of food from the air-conditioned guards' room would waft it in. There was talk of suicide, Shoham said, but because their guards so feared that happening, they installed cameras in the tunnel and supplied the hostages a single set of plastic utensils that they used (and never cleaned with water) for the 200 days he spent underground.

Shoham had been kidnapped with his family from the kibbutz of Be'eri in southern Israel. He was taken first, he said -- before 20 of their neighbors and friends had been murdered. During the first six weeks of his captivity, Shoham was racked with obsessive thoughts about their fate. He said he would toggle through different scenarios: that his wife Adi would be dead and their two kids survived, one child dead and the other killed, or "hardest of all that just my wife Adi survived" and the children killed. So to end the pain, he said he decided to bury them: "I imagined a big grave and two small ones with all of my community in my village and behind me, and like I gave a speech to every one of them. And it was the toughest thing that I did in my life. But I feel that I actually need to do it. I actually need to not only to [...] do it for myself, but in case they are dead, just to let them go."

A few days later, he said he learned they had been taken captive, and were among 50 mostly women and children released during a temporary ceasefire of the war that was reached in November 2023.

After about 30 days in captivity, Shoham said Guy Gilboa-Dalal and Evyatar David were brought to the safe house where he was being held. About nine months later, the three of them were taken underground and left where he said they were put in a tunnel along with fellow hostage Omer Wenkert, whom Shoham said was already there.

But for 40-year-old Shoham, it got far worse. An infection started in his mouth and gums, then came the pain and inflammation, the opening of old wounds, then the swelling in his legs and the inability to walk, he said. He was bedridden, and his fellow hostages darkly joked he "was a dead man walking." He said Hamas captors brought a medic down, but they couldn't diagnose the problem, so they gave him antibiotics. Only after Shoham's release in February did doctors diagnose him with a malady so common to sailors before the 18th century: advanced scurvy.

Shoham had gone from 179 pounds to 110 pounds during his time in captivity, he said. The four men counted grains of rice to ensure they were divided equally. Shoham said their guards told them they were being purposely starved so that, upon their release, the images of their skeletal frames and sunken faces would inflame the Israeli public and force the Netanyahu government to broker a deal. But Hamas' plan backfired. When the world saw hostage Eli Sharabi, released on Feb. 8, there was an outcry. In the last two weeks of his captivity, Shoham said he and the others were stuffed with food. He was 124 pounds when the Red Cross ferried him back to Israel. 

The foreman of the tunnel team would beat them with a crowbar, Shoham said, denting the head of Wenkert, then asked the hostages to massage him and ask them why they don't love him -- a special kind of sadism. 

The ceasefire between Hamas and Israel was reached in January, and 25 living hostages were released as part of the first phase, as well as the bodies of eight deceased hostages, the following month. Hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel were also released.

But there's been a slowdown of negotiations for the second phase of the agreement, which was to see Israeli forces completely withdraw from the Gaza Strip; the release of the 59 remaining Israeli male hostages, civilians and soldiers in exchange for an agreed-upon number of prisoners in Israeli jails, and a permanent cessation of military operations and hostilities, officials have said.