Ex-hostage Segev Kalfon: Leaders put war over human lives, I had to pay the price

Former hostage Segev Kalfon, who was released this past October after 738 days in Hamas captivity, accused the government on Wednesday of waging the war against the terror group at his expense.

Hamas “took me from within the country’s borders. Why did I have to sit and pay the price? Why did I have to bear the cost of this war?” he demanded, on Kan public radio.

“If they’d gotten me out, they’d have had to stop the war — they didn’t want to get me out, because they made [the war] their first priority, above human lives,” Kalfon charged.

“Where is [the religious obligation of] redeeming captives?” he said. “You’re a right-wing government. Where are all the religious people who sit in the Knesset?

The Israeli military “bombed me so many times” during the conflict, Kalfon said, emphasizing the danger to his own life posed by the fighting. “I got to a place where I said, ‘Great, if I don’t die at [Hamas’s] hands, maybe I’ll die by accident, at the hands of my own army.’

“Twice, I emerged from ruins. They bombed me eight, nine times. Think of it. It came to where I wanted to go down into a tunnel,” he recalled. Kalfon was eventually taken underground.

A Palestinian man on the rubble of destroyed buildings in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on December 13, 2025. (Bashar Taleb / AFP)

Kalfon also laid into the government for failing to provide even 100% disability payments to the returned hostages, stressing: “Even someone who spent just one day in captivity, is entitled to sit on a beach in Mexico with a coconut in their hand for the rest of their life — and for the government to pay for it all.”

Last month, the coalition voted down a bill, put forward by an opposition lawmaker, that would have granted an NIS 4 million ($1.2 million) aid package to released hostages and their families.

Workers dismantle installations at Hostage Square in Tel Aviv on December 9, 2025. (Miriam Alster/Flash90)

Kalfon also repeated his contention that when National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir repeatedly boasted throughout the war of making conditions worse for Palestinian security prisoners, his Hamas captors intensified their beatings.

He also shared that he was allowed to listen to the radio in Gaza, and that about 16 months into his captivity, he happened to hear the voice of his mother, who was campaigning for his release. That moment, he said, marked a fundamental change in his commitment to stay alive.

“For the first year and four months, I lost hope many times. I got to a place where I thought I’d commit suicide, because I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of killing me,” he said.

“But then, after a year and four months, I received the sign from my mom, and I understood that at the end of the day it wasn’t just a sign from my mom, but from God, who wanted me to keep surviving despite the hardship.”

Freed hostage Segev Kalfon is released to his home from Kfar Maccabiah in Ramat Gan, October 26, 2025. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)

Now that he has returned, Kalfon said, “I wake up a lot in the middle of the night; I don’t sleep much.” He told the interviewer: “I’m in therapy — I have a therapist — but no one’s been through what I’ve been through.”

“I give myself an hour, two hours, at night, to fall apart if I need to. My eyes saw things, my ears heard things, my body felt things that you can’t erase,” he said.

A resident of Dimona, Kalfon tried to run away from the Nova rave on October 7, when Hamas terrorists rampaged the site, killing over 360 people and kidnapping dozens more, amid the larger onslaught that saw 1,200 people, mostly civilians, killed, and 251 taken hostage.

When Kalfon crossed Highway 232, the main highway leading out of the area, the terrorists spotted him and abducted him.

Ex-hostage Segev Kalfon: Leaders put war over human lives, I had to pay the price

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