GAZA CITY: The armed wing of Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad published a video Thursday of an Israeli-German hostage who was abducted to Gaza in October 2023 during the attack that sparked the Gaza war.
In the six-minute video, the male hostage, speaking in Hebrew, is seen watching recent news footage of the hunger crisis in Gaza. He identifies himself and pleads with the Israeli government to secure his release.
AFP was not immediately able to confirm the authenticity of the video nor the date it was filmed, but was able — along with several Israeli news outlets — to identify the hostage as Rom Braslavksi, a German-Israeli dual national.
Islamic Jihad announced last week that it had lost contact with the hostage and repeats this in commentary at the beginning of the latest video, suggesting the images were filmed more than a week ago.
A previous video of Braslavski was released on April 16.
Originally from Jerusalem, Braslavski was a security agent at the Nova music festival, one of the sites attacked in October 2023 by Hamas and other Palestinian fighters, including members of Islamic Jihad.
The footage, distributed by a movement considered a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union, shows the young man watching an Arabic-language television channel broadcasting a report on hunger in Gaza.
Before his abduction, he rescued several festivalgoers, according to witnesses who managed to escape.
Of the 251 people taken from Israel that day, 49 are still held in Gaza, 27 of whom are dead, according to the Israeli army.
Israel has been fighting Hamas in Gaza since the kidnappings, but a truce from January 19 to March 17 allowed the return of 33 hostages to Israel, eight of them dead, in exchange for the release of approximately 1,800 Palestinians from Israeli jails.