In an interview with Colombia’s Blu Radio, Rebecca Gonzalez said that she received news of her husband from Ohad Ben Ami, one of the three hostages released by Hamas last weekend.
The three, whose emaciated appearance caused widespread shock, were released under the fifth exchange of prisoners since Israel and Hamas agreed a truce in their 15-month war on January 19.
“He (Ben Ami) brought me proof of life from my husband. I received a message, I even received a song in which he asks me to be strong,” Gonzalez, who is Colombian, said.
“He is alive, and we need to get him out of there immediately,” she pleaded.
Relating Ben Ami’s account of his captivity, which left him in a “severe nutritional state” according to doctors, Gonzalez said: “They are in tunnels, they are not allowed to see the light, they are not allowed to go out for air.”
She said her husband was living on a piece of bread a day, “very little water” and was “mistreated physically and psychologically.”
Bohbot, who hails from the town of Mevasseret Tzion near Jerusalem and has a young son, was one of the producers of the Supernova music festival, which Hamas gunmen stormed during their October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
His childhood friends and fellow rave organizers Michael and Osher Vaknin were killed in the attack.
A Hamas video from October 7 posted online showed Bohbot, now aged 36, bound and injured in the face, being held by the Palestinian armed group.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro gave him Colombian nationality a month after the attacks.
His wife asked the leftist Petro, a fierce critic of Israel’s devastating retaliatory campaign in Gaza, to use his visits to the United Arab Emirates and Qatar this week to press for Bohbot’s release.
The Hamas attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,211 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.
The group also took 251 hostages, of whom 73 remain in Gaza, including 35 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory campaign has reduced most of Gaza to rubble and killed at least 48,222 people, the majority of them civilians, according to figures from the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.
The United Nations considers the ministry’s figures reliable.
© 2025 AFP
