The children that returned from captivity – a scientific article

Introduction

The authors of this article start by mentioning that there is no medical literature about a similar situation to that which happened on October 7th. There is existing literature about soldiers returning from captivity, but no such literature about children.
Therefore, the purpose of this article was to describe the characteristics of the 26 children and women that returned from Hamas captivity.

I have to quote the following sentence from the article: “The attack itself resulted in the death of over 1250 Israelis, mostly citizens and the kidnapping and hostage-taking of more than 250 individuals, including men, women, children, infants and elderly, about half of them are still held hostage”.

And I’d just like to emphasize once again, in a world where the truth has no face, and prestigious medical journals refuse to accept Israeli articles, and even go ahead and accept false articles from our enemy, we must respect and be grateful to ACTA for accepting this article for publication.

Methods

A retrospective study about the characteristics of 26 people, most of whom were children, that returned to Schneider Children’s Medical Center in Israel as part of the hostage return deal in November and December 2023.
The authors mention all the preparations that were made, by countless disciplines in the hospital (medical, nursing, pharmacy, psychology, social work, nutrition, and so forth) and the prior familiarization with the medical charts of each one of the returning hostages. At the same time, confidentiality with the ministry of health and security and patient privacy was maintained.
All the hostages underwent medical history taking and physical assessments upon admission and investigations (blood/urine/stool/other) as needed. At the same time a psychological and social assessment was carried out.

Results

As mentioned above, 26 hostages, of which 19 were children at a median age of 12.1 years and 7 were women aged 34-78. The returning hostages included 6 nuclear families as well as 7 children abducted alone (!) and held separately.
About 80% of the hostages had at least one family member that had been abducted and 57% had one family member that had been killed.
The median number of days that they had been held was 51 (range from 49-53).
The number of hospitalization days was 4 (range 1-9).
About 30% returned to their home and the remainder returned to alternate living residence.

“…as some of the houses were burned during the attack while others were located in declared war zones.”

The article mentioned the underlying medical history of the hostages. For example, 3 children had asthma and how medications and treatment were not given consistently to any of the hostages.

The article goes on to describe specific medical conditions that the hostages suffered from, including constipation and encopresis (what is encopresis? Find out more here), diarrhea (some of which was prolonged) and significant weight loss in most of the hostages.
When it came to weight loss, children that were held hostage together with an adult lost less weight compared to the other. Do you realize why this happened? The adults had given the children the little food they received.
What else? Lice in 6/26, many bites, worsening of atopic dermatitis, muscle pains and serological evidence of several infections that are transmitted through ticks, bed-bugs and fleas.
Physical trauma? Evidence of shrapnel injuries in the body of 8 hostages.
Psychology? 24 of 26 witnessed abduction or killing of a family member on October 7th. They had all experienced different forms of psychological terror during captivity. The returning hostages had high prevalence of nightmares. The authors describe how the children whispered when talking because they were forced to whisper during captivity. During the first few days of hospitalization, they went back to speaking in their natural voices.
More and more.

Discussion

As mentioned, this is the first scientific description of a situation that has caused outrage in the world. There is great importance in this article as it is the first in the world to describe such a situation and it cannot be compared to soldiers held in captivity that return after a war, for example.

The conclusions of the study can be useful for healthcare professionals across the world if they are ever to encounter such a situation. At the same time, the findings of this study and its conclusion should cause sleepless nights to any decent person who reads it.
The authors emphasize the act that the 4 days of hospitalization are a drop in the ocean of days of rehabilitation that these people will need to undergo. At the same time, we must remember that there are hostages that returned to other hospitals and the details of their findings are not in this article.

How shall we summarize this?

Thank you to the team of professionals that cared for the returning hostages and to the healthcare team that wrote this article.
And all that is left to us, the Israelis, is to hope for the return of all hospitals, quickly.

I will finish off with this wonderful quote from the article:
“As paediatricians, we are hopeful that the insights gained from our experience and detailed in this article will never again be clinically relevant in the future as children and their mothers should be spared from these atrocious situations.”
Amen.