TEL AVIV, Israel — A Hamas commander presented six Israeli hostages huddled in a tunnel in the Gaza Strip with a choice: Pick three to be executed and three to be shot in the leg, recalled one of the captives, Segev Kalfon.

“He pointed a Kalashnikov rifle to my head and asked, ‘Should you be first?’”

Kalfon said he persuaded the burly commander to spare him.

“But then he wanted to kill my friend,” he added.

For hours, the Palestinian militant toyed with them, before sending them all back to their cell.

After surviving two years in captivity, Kalfon was released Oct. 13 as part of a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas in which the last 20 living hostages were freed in exchange for 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees.

Kalfon was among the first to speak openly about his experience. He was abducted Oct. 7, 2023, when Palestinian militants rampaged through southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and abducting roughly 250 others.

Like many hostages, Kalfon’s account of his 738 days in captivity included numerous examples of physical and mental abuse. The captors broke his teeth, starved him and pressured him to convert to Islam.

He blames Israeli officials for drawing out his captivity, believing those in power could have acted sooner to hasten his release.

After a far-right Israeli minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, bragged about worsening the conditions for Palestinians in Israeli jails, Kalfon said that he and other hostages were beaten.

Kalfon, now 27, spoke to The New York Times as he sat outside a hotel turned into a rehabilitation center near Tel Aviv, Israel. Speaking out, he said, is therapeutic.

Many of the details he recounted aligned with what some of the other hostages held with him told Israeli media. Several of them corroborated episodes like the mind games and the beatings they endured as revenge for Ben-Gvir’s words.

Hamas did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Kalfon described being deprived of food. During one stretch, he had to make a small can of beans last two days. At times, standing became a struggle.

The last 20 living hostages appeared to be in better condition than the frail captives released earlier in the war.

Kalfon said that Hamas had given them more food in the prelude to their release. A doctor who treated 10 of those returned hostages, Dr. Noya Shilo of Sheba Medical Center, said that they told her that Hamas had given them more food in their final days of captivity.

“The longer people were in captivity, the deeper the damage,” Shilo said. “They went through horrible abuse,” she added, noting that some of the physical and mental consequences could take years to surface.

Other captives who spoke after they were released also said that they were held in suffocating underground makeshift cells, beaten, and given barely enough food to survive. Some said they were kept in solitude for long periods. Two said they were victims of sexual violence.

Guy Gilboa-Dalal, who was freed on the same day as Kalfon, told the Israeli channel N12 that on one occasion, after he had showered and was still naked, his captor forcibly touched his body.

For Kalfon, the second year of captivity was worse. Desperation drove him to devise a dangerous escape plan, he said.

Then he heard his mother, Galit Kalfon, speaking on a radio the hostages had managed to tune to Israeli broadcasts.

“She said she misses me,” he recalled. He abandoned the idea of escaping — hearing her voice, he said, gave him “an ocean of hope” that he would return.

‘Survive Another Day’

On the day of the Oct. 7 attack, Kalfon said he fled the Nova music festival under a hail of rocket fire from Gaza, sprinting through furrowed fields, bullets whistling overhead. He fell straight into the hands of a group of gunmen in white pickup trucks.

Blindfolded and bound, he repeated the Shema, a Jewish prayer, in his head as his captors beat him ferociously.

“I got to the point where I didn’t feel the blows,” he said.

Before his capture, Kalfon, from Dimona, in southern Israel, worked in his father’s bakery and as a fiber-optic cable installer. He had recently begun a career as a financial trader.

After being driven into Gaza, he said he was stripped down to his underwear and questioned as one militant held a box cutter to his throat. He was soon joined by two more captives, Yosef-Chaim Ohana and Maxim Herkin. For the next eight months, the three men were held in apartments in central Gaza, hustled from one hideout to another under Israeli bombardment, Kalfon said.

He was constantly petrified, fearing that his captors could kill him at any moment, while Israel’s “rain of missiles” was also terrifying, he said.

“All I would think of was how to survive another day,” he recalled.

In that first week, when he asked to use a bathroom, he said a gunman tripped him every step of the way and whipped him repeatedly.

A few days later, an Israeli airstrike blew away the top three floors of the building the hostages were in. The kidnappers threw them clothes and flip-flops to put on, then led them onto the street to the next location.

In total, the three men would stay in about a half dozen locations, some for as little as a few days and some for a few months. They shared a used toothbrush. Mice scuttled around sometimes, Kalfon recalled.

He said they were forbidden from talking to one another. Save for a few snatched whispers, Kalfon said they were silent, “like one tree next to another.”

Gunmen came and went, often ferrying weapons. One played around with live grenades to scare them, Kalfon said.

On many days, he said all they had to eat was a quarter of a tomato and a shared small bowl of rice.