Saturday June 8 was a day where everything came together. Life and death. Joy and mourning. Euphoria and despair. “I received a call from the officer who was liaison with the army. He shouted to me that my nephew was released. Five minutes later we were on our way to Sheba Hospital”, near Tel Aviv, remembers Aviram Meir, the uncle of Almog Meir Jan, kidnapped during the Nova electronic music festival which, on October 7, 2023, ended at the moment when Hamas began the worst massacre of the history of Israel. Some 1,200 Israelis were killed that day. Almog, a young man of average height, looking shy in the photos, was due to start a new job in the new technology sector the next day, after completing his military service.
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For the young 21-year-old hostage, now hospitalized at Sheba hospital, near Tel Aviv, which accommodates former captives, the first two months were the most difficult. He was taken from cache to cache. Food was scarce. But he was not alone: two other hostages shared his eight months of detention with him: Shlomi Ziv, 41, and Andreï Kozlov, 27, Israeli-Russian. Two festival security guards.
The three kidnapped were then installed on the first floor of a house in a neighborhood of Nousseirat, a refugee camp located in the center of the Gaza enclave which has transformed into a town of nearly 100,000 inhabitants. The house belonged to Ahmad Al-Jamal, a notable close to Hamas. The hostages spent six months in a room with closed curtains, constantly monitored by armed guards – “between two and five”, according to Aviram Meir. From that moment on, their lot improved somewhat. “They no longer suffered from hunger”adds the uncle.
Israelis could trade with each other. A family lived on the ground floor of the house. They never saw it, but heard it. They identified the voices of five children. The rest of the time, they played cards and gave each other language lessons. Andrei learned Hebrew and taught Russian; Shlomi, the oldest at 41, was the one who spoke Arabic best.
“Inventing a new medicine”
The guards put mental and physical pressure on the detainees, but Aviram Meir doesn’t go into detail: “We didn’t ask him how it went. The doctors asked us not to do it. » The most traumatic moments of this experience will emerge – perhaps – in several weeks or several years. THE Wall Street Journal spoke of punishments such as being locked in an isolated room or being covered by several mattresses during extreme heat.
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