Aviva Siegel was with her husband, Keith, when Hamas fighters stormed their home.
Jerusalem, undefined:
The war in Gaza has lasted for nearly six months, and the families of hostages still held by Hamas are desperate for release, and many former hostages are looking for words to describe the pain of captivity.
“I’ve been through hell,” Aviva Siegel, who was imprisoned in Gaza for 51 days, told AFP.
On the morning of October 7, Siegel, who is in her early 60s and wears round glasses and dark gray hair, was with her husband Keith when Hamas fighters broke into their home in Kibbutz Kfar al-Azha. kidnapped them and took them to Gaza.
For more than seven weeks, they were towed from tunnel to tunnel in harsh conditions, she said.
“They wouldn’t let us speak, they wouldn’t let us stand up,” Siegel said. Seagal was released in November as part of a brief truce.
Her husband remains imprisoned in war-torn Gaza.
According to an AFP tally of official Israeli data, Hamas launched an attack on October 7, kidnapping about 250 people and killing about 1,170 Israelis and foreigners, most of them civilians.
November’s truce, the only war so far, saw the release of 80 hostages in exchange for the return of 240 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. The other 25 hostages, mainly Thai farm workers, were released outside the agreement.
Hamas released four prisoners before the truce, and Israel released three more, including two in a military operation in mid-February.
Israel believes that some 130 people remain in Gaza, 34 of whom are presumed dead.
Sunday will mark six months since their abduction and the outbreak of war.
Israel’s retaliatory bombings and ground incursions into Gaza aimed at destroying Hamas have killed at least 32,975 people, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry of the Hamas-controlled region.
More than a third of the freed hostages have spoken publicly about their experiences in media interviews, public events or in videos filmed by the Hostage Family Forum, an association representing some relatives.
“Permanent Fear”
Many former hostages spoke of experiencing “hell” without detailing the circumstances of their captivity.
“Even if I tell you what the hostages have been through, you can’t imagine what they are going through… I’m back from hell,” said Mia Regev, an Israeli who was released in November after 51 days as a hostage . .
The 21-year-old woman was shot dead on October 7 at the Nova Carnival, where nearly 40 people were kidnapped.
“Eight days later they removed the bullet from my foot and operated on me. The care was terrible and dismissive, not humane treatment, and when I arrived in Israel I developed a complicated infection,” she said in said shortly after his release.
Doron Katz-Asher was kidnapped and shot to death along with her two daughters, Raz, four, and Aviv, two. He said his treatment was “without anesthesia, using needles and threads.”
Katz-Asher spoke of “perpetual fear” in an interview with Israeli television channel N12, a point mentioned by nearly all the hostages who spoke.
“Ten of us lived in a 12-square-meter room with no beds and just a sink and bottled water… My daughters had a fever.
Danielle Aloni, who was released with her five-year-old daughter, said of her captivity, “We slept, we cried, nothing happened, every day was an eternity, it was terrible “.
Female hostages have a very strong fear of sexual violence.
Amit Soussana, 40, another hostage in Kfar Aza, described the sexual assault in a lengthy interview with The New York Times.
She said a guard “pointed a gun at me and forced me to perform a sex act on him.”
Susanna is the only former captive to explicitly describe sexual violence, although Siegel said of the imprisoned women: “They turned these girls into dolls that they could use however they wanted.”
“No crying”
“I was a witness, I saw a girl being tortured… I wanted to go back and protect them, I saw what the girls went through,” Siegel added.
Another former hostage, Yarden Roman-Gat, told Kan 11, “As a woman, the fear of being raped or sexually assaulted is constant and there is no way to protect yourself or resist. It means risking your life and that fear will never go away from you.”
Her sister-in-law, Carmel Gat, 39, remains imprisoned in Gaza along with 13 other women.
Mothers who were abducted with their children, such as Hagar Brodetz, who was abducted with her three children (ages 4 to 10), expressed concern about being kidnapped with their children. The captivity was extremely frightening.
“No crying, laughing or talking loudly… You can’t teach a 4-year-old to cry silently… Everything you created to protect the child is gone… The kids are hungry and they only eat one pita a day, I don’t want any mother to have to beg for food for her children,” Broadz said.
Liat Atzili, 49, is a history teacher at a school that organizes guided tours of the Holocaust memorial. After her release, she learned that her husband, Aviv, had been killed on 7 October.
“I’m back from the dead,” she told N12. “Lack of food, lack of medicine, poor sanitation… every day is endless and a source of utter despair.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
