“It was so moving that we couldn’t talk to each other,” confides Mikhail Kozlov, recounting his reunion with his son Andreï, freed by the Israeli army after 8 months of captivity in Gaza in the hands of Hamas.
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The filmed meeting shows the young Israeli-Russian literally falling at his mother’s feet and bursting into tears, his mother hugging him. These images made the rounds on social networks and television channels in Israel.
His mother, Evguenia Kozlov, added, remembering that before learning of his release, “they had never lost hope” of seeing him again.
She claims to have feared “that Andrei would no longer be the same”.
“But it was a storm of energy, an emotional shock wave that came from him,” says Ms. Kozlov.
Andrei Kozlov, 27, was released on June 7 during an Israeli army operation in Nusseirat, in the center of the Gaza Strip, as were Noa Argamani, 26, Almog Meir Jan, 22, and Shlomi Ziv, 41 years old. All four were kidnapped by Hamas on October 7 at the Nova electro music festival, during the bloody attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement in Israel.
Their release was greeted with jubilation in Israel.
Andrei Kozlov’s parents, Mikhail and Evguenia, both 52 years old and Russian, live in Saint Petersburg (northwest Russia) and took the plane to find their son after eight months of a long wait , the day after his release.
In an interview given in Russian to AFP, they tell what they know about his captivity.
“He tells us certain things. He says there are others that he will never tell us,” says the father.
“Deprived of any choice”
“One day one of his captors showed him that he would film and kill him on camera to show the whole world. And he said it wouldn’t be now, it would be tomorrow and he left it (…), he must have thought about it all day,” says Mr. Kozlov.
“Hands and feet tied for two months, and at the beginning with his hands tied behind his back,” their son partly described his captivity to them, according to his father.
When asked how he is five days after his return to Israel, where he had settled a year and a half before the Hamas attack, the father said that he “finds it difficult to make a decision, even the easier because he was deprived of this opportunity for a long time.”
“He doesn’t know what to say when we give him a choice between rice and pasta, he was deprived of any choice for eight months,” adds the father.
Upon his release, the young man discovered that there were 116 other October 7 hostages still held in Gaza (out of the 251 people kidnapped that day in Israel), 41 of whom were declared dead by the Israeli army.
“He is one of those who can imagine the conditions endured” by the other hostages, explains Mr. Kozlov.
Like other families of released hostages, the Kozlovs want to get involved in defending the cause of the captives in the hands of Hamas.
“He and we, our whole family, are terribly worried about these people, and we call on governments to quickly reach an agreement and help these people return to their families,” says Kozlov.
Since the one-week truce at the end of November, hopes of a ceasefire, even if only temporary, have been regularly disappointed.
The surprise attack by Hamas commandos on October 7 on southern Israel from the Gaza Strip led to the death of 1,194 people on the Israeli side, the majority civilians, according to an AFP count carried out from official Israeli data.
The Israeli military campaign of retaliation has devastated the Gaza Strip and cost the lives of more than 37,230 Palestinians, the majority civilians, according to data from the Health Ministry of the Hamas government for Gaza.
