“I went through hell, I was hungry, thirsty,” says Aviva Siegel, a former Hamas hostage in the Gaza Strip. Like her, other Israeli survivors testify to the ordeal experienced during their detention to begin to put words to the unspeakable, six months after the start of the war.
On the morning of October 7, Mme Siegel, in her early 60s, with round glasses and charcoal hair, was with her husband Keith when Palestinian Hamas fighters burst into their home on Kibbutz Kfar Aza to kidnap them and take them to the Gaza Strip.
For 51 days, the couple was dragged from tunnel to tunnel in more than Spartan conditions. “They didn’t let us talk, we weren’t allowed to stand,” this woman, released at the end of November as part of a truce agreement, told AFP.
Around 250 people were kidnapped on October 7 during the Hamas attack which led to the death of 1,170 people on the Israeli side, the majority civilians, according to an AFP count based on official data.
More than 100 captives were released at the end of November in exchange for the release of Palestinians held by Israel during the only truce in the war to date, five more before this agreement and two released in an Israeli military operation in mid-February.
According to Israeli authorities, 130 hostages from October 7 remain in Gaza, of whom at least 34 are dead.
Israeli military operations in Gaza in retaliation for October 7 have left more than 32,900 dead to date, the majority of them women and children, according to the Hamas government’s Health Ministry.
More than a third of the released hostages spoke publicly in interviews with the media, during public events or in videos filmed by the Hostage Families Forum, an association representing some of these families.
“Permanent fear”
Several of them, without detailing the conditions of their captivity, speak of “a hell”, like Mme Siegel, whose husband is still held in Gaza.
“Even if I tell you what the hostages are going through, you won’t be able to imagine what they are going through […] I came back from hell,” testified Mia Regev, an Israeli released at the end of November after 51 days of captivity in Gaza.
This 21-year-old woman was shot and injured on October 7 at the Nova electronic music festival where nearly 40 people were kidnapped. “After 8 days, they took the ball out of my foot and operated on me, the care was bad and contemptuous, not humane treatment and when I arrived here, in Israel, I had complicated infections,” had -she confided shortly after her release.
Also injured by bullets, Doron Katz-Asher, kidnapped with her two daughters Raz (4 years old) and Aviv (2 years old), says she was treated “without anesthesia with a needle and thread”.
In an interview with Israeli channel N12, Mme Katz-Asher testified to “permanent fear,” an expression that recurs in almost all testimonies. “There were ten of us in a 12 square meter room without a bed, with just a sink and bottles of water […], my daughters had a fever. »
“We sleep, we cry, nothing happens, every day is an eternity, it’s so scary,” said Danielle Aloni, released with her five-year-old daughter.
For female hostages, one of the fears is the fear of being raped.
Amit Soussana, 40, kidnapped from her home in the Kibbutz of Kfar Aza, said in a long interview with New York Times sexual assaults suffered in captivity. “He forced me, with the gun pointed at me, to commit a sexual act,” she told the American daily.
None of the other released hostages has so far testified to sexual violence suffered, but Mme Siegel particularly spoke of the plight of women in captivity: “They turned these girls into dolls that they could use however they wanted.”
“Forbidden to cry”
“I am a witness, I saw a girl tortured […] I would like to go back and protect them, I saw what the girls went through,” she added. “As a woman, the fear of being raped or being sexually assaulted is permanent, to be without any means of defending yourself, to oppose is to risk your life, this fear does not leave you,” Yarden confided Roman-Gat on the Kan 11 channel.
Her sister-in-law Carmel Gat, 39, is still in Gaza like 13 other women.
For mothers kidnapped with children, the fear is even greater, according to testimonies.
“It was forbidden to cry or laugh or speak loudly […]you can’t teach a 4 year old to cry in silence […]everything you created to protect your children disappears… The children were hungry, they had one pita a day, I don’t wish any mother to have to beg for food to be given to her children,” said Hagar Brodetz , taken with three children aged 4 to 10.
Liat Atzili, 49, a high school history teacher who gives guided tours to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, learned after her release that her husband Aviv had been killed on October 7.
“I came back from the dead,” she told the N12 channel, but “the lack of food, medicine, horrible hygienic conditions […]every day is endless, it was total despair.”