kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7, 2023, Tami Metzger, 80, “remembers everything”

On October 7, 2023 in the early morning, this resident of Kibbutz Nir Oz, near the Gaza Strip, was kidnapped with her husband. Released around fifty days later but returned alone, Tami Metzger “remember everything”. She agreed to meet a “Special Envoy” team and talk about her detention.

“They started leading us into a tunnel. We walked for a very long time, in the mud, without shoes. We had lost them on the way,” she begins. Tami was with twelve people, almost all of them captured at Nir Oz. Mainly elderly people, guarded by four jailers. On an IDF video that the journalist shows her, she recognizes the sand on the path, the cells.

With precision, she then details her daily life, the “piece of pita”, THE “small triangle piece of cheese” and the “two dates” that the hostages received in the morning, the days mainly punctuated by boredom: “Some were crying, some couldn’t sleep at all.” Tami managed to doze off when her husband Yoram was watching over her. What was she thinking? “I was thinking of my house, of my children, my grandchildren… of Nir Oz. Not just my little house, my house, it’s the whole kibbutz.”

Until one day, her jailers tell her that she is going to be released. But Tami doesn’t want to be separated from her husband. “So they pushed me. I said I wanted to stay with him. My husband was shouting, ‘Leave! Go find the kids’.” Tami will never see Yoram again, with whom she had lived for sixty years. “They put a bullet in his head. It’s like someone stole my other half.” The death of Yoram Metzger was announced by Israel in June 2024. His autopsy confirmed that he had been executed.

Excerpt from “Israel: the ghosts of Nir Oz”, a broadcast report in “Special Envoy(New window)” on September 26, 2024.

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