TEL AVIV | “I’m still in Gaza, I haven’t left,” says Aviva Siegel, who was hostage by Hamas for 51 days and is awaiting the return of her husband, Keith, still captive in the Gaza Strip.
Keith and Aviva Siegel, in their sixties, were captured during the Hamas attack on October 7 on Kibbutz Kfar Aza (southern Israel), the scene of a massacre committed by commandos of the Palestinian Islamist movement.
“I’m in spirit with Keith all the time, I can’t bear to think that he and the other hostages are 40 meters underground, that they have no air to breathe, that they don’t “They have nothing to eat, they have nothing good,” she told AFP.
Released during the only truce in the war which allowed 105 hostages to leave Gaza at the end of November in exchange for the release of 240 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, Ms.me Siegel was one of the first ex-hostages to recount her ordeal.
“I wished to die so many times” in captivity, she said, her voice breaking with emotion. “When I came out I had lost 10 kilos, I could barely walk, eat or drink, I don’t want to imagine the situation Keith is in.”
Mme Siegel says she came shortly after her release to the weekly rallies organized in Tel Aviv by the Hostage Families Forum to demand that Israeli authorities sign a truce agreement with Hamas that would allow the hostages’ release.
“Unforgivable”
Referring to the tunnel in the south of the Gaza Strip where the army found the bodies of six hostages at the end of August, shot dead according to Israel by their captors, she remembers the underground in which she was held for weeks with her husband. “Keith is still there,” she told AFP on the sidelines of one of these demonstrations.
“I’m coming [à ces rassemblements] because I see Keith in front of me, I see the young women [otages]I think about them all the time and wonder what more I can do […] we have to take them out, it’s too cruel […]it’s unbearable and unforgivable,” she protests.
Of the 251 people kidnapped on October 7, 97 are still hostages in the Gaza Strip, 33 of whom were declared dead by the Israeli army.
Like Mme Siegel, Raz Ben Ami, was released during the November truce. Her husband, Ohad Ben Ami, 55, with whom she was captured at Kibbutz Beeri, is still detained in Gaza.
«Cruel»
Mme Ben Ami has a lot of trouble leaving the house, according to her daughter, Ella Ben Ami. But the recent discovery of the six slain hostages pushed her to come out to call for her husband’s release.
In mid-September, during a demonstration in Tel Aviv, she spoke, wearing a T-shirt with her husband’s photo.
“I’m fed up, I spent 54 days in captivity […]I’m fed up with my government not doing enough to bring back the hostages […] I’m tired of this nightmare that brings me back to Gaza every day,” she said: “I’m tired of burying hostages who have returned in coffins […]Hamas is cruel and will not bring them back to us, but the government can and must bring them back.”
A regular at Saturday night protests in Tel Aviv, Bat-Sheva Yahalomi takes part by holding up a portrait of her husband, Ohad Yahalomi, captured wounded at their home on Kibbutz Nir Oz, in the hope that he will be able to see her from Gaza and keep “hope”.
Bat-Sheva Yahalomi
Photo AFP
But for this Franco-Israeli, mother of three children, whose eldest, Eitan, 12 years old at the time of his kidnapping, spent 52 days hostage in Gaza, “it is still October 7”.
“What breaks me is the despair, the idea that [les otages] “lose hope and don’t believe they will ever be saved,” she says, in the living room of her new home on a kibbutz in central Israel.
“I prefer to hope”
“I also think the last thing he saw was us being kidnapped, and he probably doesn’t know what happened to us,” she said of the moment gunmen took her and his three children, as he lay injured but conscious at the entrance to their home.
Mme Yahalomi managed to escape before being taken to the Gaza Strip and returned to Nir Oz with her two daughters, aged 10 and one and a half years old, seeing in the distance her son leaving towards the unknown on the motorbike. of his captors.
On the refrigerator, in addition to the usual family photos of happier times, is a portrait of her husband, topped with the inscription “Bring Them Home”.
Ohad Yahalomi, 50, employee of the Parks and Nature Authority, “loves family and nature”, according to his wife who, discreet about her own difficulties in life since October 7, prefers to talk about those of her children , who often talk about their father, asking if he is alive.
“I tell them the truth,” she testifies: “I don’t know, but I prefer to hope that he is alive.”
When she imagines his return, she says she hopes that “he is not a shadow of himself. But if sometimes I believe in his return, I am not sure that he is still alive.”
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