Hostage

What happens when a person is subject to the cruelest behavior man can commit – such as torture, starvation, psychological warfare and lack of medical care? In the hours following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, it became clear that the Palestinian terror organization – which has ruled Gaza as a militant theocracy since 2006 – was determined to inflict as much pain on the more than 200 Israelis it had kidnapped earlier in the day.

By evening – some 12 hours after Hamas had begun its attack by firing thousands of missiles toward Israel as the sun was rising at 6:29 a.m. – Israelis shuddered when the first videos of the kidnapped were released. It had already been the worst attack on Israeli soil since its founding in 1948. Over 1,200 had already been slaughtered that day in every nearly conceivable way a man can kill a fellow human being. Armed with machine guns, grenades, rocket propelled grenades or RPGs, and a staggering amount of other lethal weapons, Hamas had broken through more than 60 sections of the Gaza border fence, allowing as many as 6,000 Hamas terrorists to storm Israeli army bases, kibbutzim, and medium-sized cities such as Sderot and Ofakim with little opposition by the IDF.

In its initiative to spread world jihad, and normalize its vision where murder and oppression go hand in hand with religion, Hamas live streamed its attack on social media. Hence, they documented the mass murder as they sprayed bullets in the faces and backs of Israelis, burned families alive, and raped women and men before shooting them. In one case, after Hamas beheaded a soldier, they brought the head back to Gaza and put it up for sale.

As the country was reeling from the attack, the grainy videos of young and old Israelis bound in Gaza were a further insult to the largest intelligence failure in Israel’s 75-year existence. Young men and women, looking dazed and terrified, were filmed bound and face down on the floor. Hamas gunmen were filmed selecting Israeli female soldiers they desired. All had been subject to vicious beatings. It was impossible to grasp the horror and shock that they felt.

Somewhere, in the warren of streets and tunnels that lay under the darkness of Gaza on the evening of October 7, were four Israelis who had lived modest lives up until that day.

KEITH AND AVIVA SIEGEL expected that October 7 would be another quiet Shabbat and Simchat Torah on their kibbutz, Kfar Aza. The collective was their slice of heaven going back to the early 1980s, when they moved to the agricultural collective. Keith, the son of a prominent physician and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, made aliyah in his late teens and fell in love with Aviva, who had moved with her family to Israel from South Africa. Keith tilled the land and became a farmer, and Aviva settled in as the kibbutz’s kindergarten teacher. Keith went back to school and became an occupational therapist; he eventually went to work for a pharmaceutical company. Meanwhile, they made dozens of close friends on the kibbutz and raised their four children under the endless sunshine of their kibbutz – less than a mile from the Gaza border.

About nine miles south, along the main border road 232 – which rambles from Ashdod all the way to the Kerem Shalom Egyptian border crossing – Elkana Bohbot and Yosef Chaim Ohana were listening to the trance music that boomed throughout the night at the Nova Music Festival. Surrounded by thousands of other Israelis – and hundreds of others who had flown in from all over the world to attend the festival – and billed as a celebration of peace and nature at the bucolic grounds of Kibbutz Re’im, it was the culmination of six months of planning by Elkana Bohbot. Elkana grew up in the Ramot section of Jerusalem, and had moved to nearby Mevaseret Zion, with his wife Rebecca, and his toddler son, Re’em. Elkana was in charge of the mushroom stage at the festival along with his two business partners, identical twins Osher and Michael Vaknin.

Somewhere in the crowd, Yosef Chaim Ohana was smiling. He had grown up in the hardscrabble city of Kiryat Malakhi. He had come from a religious family but had gone out on his own, and by the time he enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces, he chose the Givati Brigade – an elite infantry, specializing in rapid deployment and combat operations. After his IDF service, he traveled extensively and returned to Israel to work as a bartender. Now, in the crisp morning air – amid a golden sunrise – he felt relaxed as he danced to the music he loved.

For social historians of the country, the Nova music and dance festival marked a significant change in societal expression. For much of Israel’s history, celebrations were modest and more in line with Israel’s socialist founding fathers’ ideals. Up until the 1980s, salaries were paltry, few owned cars, there was just one TV channel and it sometimes took years just to get a home telephone. Possession of recreational drugs – such as hashish or marijuana – meant a criminal record and often jail time. For most, the world revolved around the family.

But in recent decades, the country has embraced capitalism. Israeli high-tech innovators introduced the world to the USB flash drive, the GPS navigation app Waze, the first commercial firewall software and generations of Intel processors. Business has changed the family dynamic – and also created an economic divide: As cranes construct more and more skyscrapers in Tel Aviv – now considered the most expensive city in the world to reside in – one out of four children live below the poverty line in Israel.

As the country has grown, its priorities have shifted. For over 25 years, young adults who finish their army service have seen a backpacking trip abroad as a right of passage – with young IDF vets filling hostels from Thailand to India to Nepal. So, when thousands of young Israelis turned a remote kibbutz field into a giant outdoor dance floor just a couple of miles from the Gaza border – with a significant minority ingesting psychedelic drugs – few greeted the event with more than a collective shrug.

“Until October 7, if you had asked me to describe myself, I would have said that I was like a bird – because my freedom truly felt like a bird’s. Today, if you ask me how I feel, I still feel like a bird, but with a heavy burden on my back,” Yosef Chaim Ohana told me last month as he sat in a garden at an outpatient medical facility in Ramat Gan where he receives therapy for his wounds while in Hamas captivity. Ohana, who is 25, was released along with Elkana Bohbot and 18 others in October – more than two years after being dragged to Gaza by Hamas.

IN CIVIL SOCIETIES, human beings regularly discuss many of life’s scenarios including the subject of death. But few can imagine witnessing mass murder, or being kidnapped and tortured.

For Yosef Chaim Ohana, Elkana Bohbot and Keith and Aviva Siegel, life’s heavy burden quickly descended on them around sunrise on October 7.

“Everything around us changed,” Yosef Chaim explained, describing what it’s like to celebrate with friends at a safe and happy party, and in the next moment, run for your life. “The rhythm suddenly accelerated. Dancers became people running. Laughter and shouts of joy turned into screams of pain, anxiety, and fear. Everything flipped in an instant. I looked around, unsure whether the music would stop or come back on. I saw explosions in the sky and heard the sirens – but in Israel, we’re used to rockets being fired at us every few months.”

Yosef Chaim quickly sprinted to the main road, Route 232, which was jammed with murdered drivers and passengers still in their cars. Amid the carnage, he was able to save a woman with multiple bullet wounds. When he brought her back to the small infirmary, he realized this was not an attack by a handful of terrorists.

“I came back with the stretcher. We lifted her – her leg covered in blood – and ran toward the doctor. I remember the doctor clearly: he had a beard and stood there looking confused. When we arrived with the wounded woman, we thought he would immediately step in, that he would see a gunshot victim and focus entirely on her,” he said.

“But then we realized she wasn’t the first. On the ground nearby, several other wounded women were already sitting there. The doctor simply told us to place her on one of the beds and didn’t even approach her – understanding that there was nothing more he could do.”

At the stage areas at Nova, Elkana Bohbot was looking to save lives. It was Elkana who quickly reacted after the initial missiles were fired from Gaza, climbing on to the stage and announcing that the party was over and that everyone needed to leave as soon as possible. In the next hour, he raced back and forth – handing out water bottles to those in shock and also trying to convince police that they needed to open another road out of the festival. The authorities finally acquiesced and opened a new exit to loosen the bottleneck of cars.

“I said to everybody, go to your car very fast and quickly. We have a road to the exit, and everybody, please go to your car and don’t stop. Just go and follow the police car,” said Elkana. “And we saved like 100 cars.”

He could not save his partners, Osher and Michael Vaknin – who were murdered that morning by Hamas gunmen. After 8 a.m., the Nova site was filled with Palestinian terrorists. “They killed policemen first, those with guns,” said Elkana, who began to run from the concert grounds. He likened it to a grisly Hollywood movie, but one in which he was running for his life. He eventually chose to hide on a small hill nearby with others, where he waited for the IDF to arrive. But instead of the IDF, he heard Hamas gunmen approaching the area speaking Arabic. People prayed, said goodbyes to their loved ones on their cell phones, and then called out for their mothers as Hamas sprayed the area with bullets from their machine guns. The sound was deafening, and when it stopped he heard the cries of his fellow Israelis. “And then it was quiet, dead quiet,” he told me when we met last month at the Sheba Medical Center outside of Tel Aviv, where he is being treated for a variety of ailments.

Hamas bound his hands, and by 8:45 a.m., he found himself in Gaza – surrounded by a jeering mob who took turns beating him. “They were all clapping. Kids as young as four, five and six – girls and boys – hit me,” he recalled.

Back on Route 232 near the Nova site, Yosef Chaim found an ambulance in the middle of the two-lane highway. But when he opened the door he discovered that everyone inside had been murdered. “We broke into the ambulance and began taking out every piece of equipment that could help us. We loaded it into a small car, thinking that with a smaller vehicle we might be able to drive along side roads. We emptied the ambulance’s equipment into a Volkswagen Golf and drove off,” he said.

Soon, he and a friend found themselves in the middle of a gun battle between Hamas and Israeli police. “Two police officers who were positioned on a vehicle were engaging in the firefight. Within moments, one of them was hit. He collapsed, bleeding,” he said.

“I took off my shirt and told myself, ‘OK, I’m going to jump to that officer, see where he was hit – maybe I can help stop the bleeding, put on a tourniquet.’ That’s why I took my shirt off. I waited for a brief moment when the gunfire paused and prepared to jump toward his vehicle. Then the vehicle he was on exploded. I was thrown through the air.”

Yosef Chaim started to run again and eventually heard a friend call out from an embankment. “I don’t know how long it lasted – somewhere between half an hour and an hour. During that time, there was a war happening outside and a psychological war happening inside us. I say ‘inside us’ because, over time, more and more people joined our hiding place, until we were eight or ten people together,” he told me.

“There was tension between us – constant discussion, speculation about what was happening outside. Then suddenly, we heard the sound of a helicopter, and you think, ‘The army is here. This is about to end. How many can they really be – 10 terrorists, 20 terrorists? The army is here. Enough time has passed for the army to arrive, to regroup, and to do something.’ For a brief moment, everything stopped. We were sure this was it – that the army had eliminated them and that we would be able to come out of hiding any second. Some of us were already preparing to leave the shelter.

“But another person and I said, ‘Wait – be patient.’ And then it didn’t end. More gunfire. The shooting started again and continued.”

An IDF tank passed and a wave of relief went through the group. But the tank disappeared. Then the group heard Arabic and more gunfire. “We all shrank inward, closed our eyes, and held hands – eight or nine men and women forming a tight circle, holding hands and taking a breath together.

“At that moment, a silence settled over us – one that came from a shared understanding among everyone in the hiding place: ‘This is it. There’s nothing we can do. In a few moments, we’re all going to die.’ We squeezed each other’s hands tightly and took a breath,” he told me.

“Then the shooting began at point-blank range. They were standing over us and started firing. I remember telling myself, ‘OK – let’s see how this feels. Where will the bullet hit me? Fine. We’ll feel it, and then we’ll die.’ About ten seconds passed, and I asked myself, ‘Am I alive, or am I dead?’”

The hands of fellow Israelis who had gripped his palms and fingers went limp and slipped to the ground.

“I found the courage to open my eyes. For a second, I opened them and saw that I was still alive. They were looking at me. I raised my hands as a sign that I was unarmed – that they didn’t need to be afraid of me, that they didn’t need to do anything else.

“One of them came over and pulled me by the hair. The others continued killing everyone around me. You have to understand: I was in the middle of the group. Everyone around me was being murdered, and not a single bullet hit me. They pulled me out of there.”

I asked him why he thought he survived.

“Until October 7, because of the life I had lived, I didn’t think much about this side of life – about miracles or divine providence. Today, I think differently. I am in a different place. But if you ask me why – why out of eight or ten incredible people, just like me, I survived while they were murdered – even if I wanted to answer you, I can’t. I don’t know. It’s a question I’m afraid to ask myself, a question I’ve already wrestled with enough. Everyone who was with me was a whole world unto themselves.”

As Hamas was taking Yosef Chaim to Gaza, Keith and Aviva Siegel were hiding in their safe room 15 minutes up the road in Kibbutz Kfar Aza. Over the years, they have spent countless hours taking shelter and know that missiles can be deadly – about 15 years ago their neighbor on the kibbutz was killed by a Hamas rocket.

But that morning, they sensed that this attack was different and stepped outside and looked at the sky. Said Aviva, “I saw all the rockets going all directions, and we ran back with another alarm, closed the door, closed the window, and I remember looking at Keith and we both said, ‘It feels like the end of the world.’ Our house was shaking. We could hear the rockets from outside and the alarms going on and on and on and then falling very close to us.”

The couple held hands as the bombing continued, and after four hours they could hear Arabic and then gunshots inside their house. About 15 terrorists broke into their safe room, picked up Keith and Aviva and threw them out of a window. Keith was shot in the hand and suffered broken ribs during the fall, and Aviva’s knee was injured. Soon, they were loaded into the back seat of Keith’s car where a terrorist held a large knife to their faces during the short drive to Gaza.

“When we arrived to Gaza, we saw all the people standing and clapping their hands and saying Allahu Akbar in Arabic, and shooting up in the air. And they were just happy. And I remember like, seeing old people – old people with a stick and babies standing there. And it was their happiest day on earth, because the terrorists that were with us, with guns on us and knives on us, were saying that we are from Israel,” said Aviva.

Soon they were brought to a home which had an entrance to a tunnel. They were forced into the tunnel, where they met other members of the kibbutz: Gali Berman – whose brother was also kidnapped – and Chen Almog- Goldstein. Goldstein was there with her three youngest children. But her husband, Nadav, and her oldest daughter, Yam, were not with her. They had been murdered that morning in front of their family by Hamas.

IN ANOTHER TUNNEL that first morning, a Hamas gunman stuck the point of a knife into Elkana Bohbot’s back and forced him to walk in the narrow, dusty shaft. In the darkness he alternately prayed for God to save his life so he could see his son and wife again; or for a quick death by a bullet. Instead, his guard insisted that he eat a piece of chocolate. Elkana declined three times and then was told if he didn’t eat the chocolate he would be murdered.

Elkana ate the chocolate, and was eventually taken to an apartment. Food was minimal – small pieces of bread with avocado, potato, or cheese. Over time, as the war escalated, the rations shrank. Bochot, who is rail thin, would lose 35 pounds and at times was so weak he could barely walk. After a few weeks, his captors approached him again. One guard, enraged over family members killed in an Israeli strike, told Bochot he would die that night. Blindfolded, Bochot was led out into the street, certain he was being taken to his execution. Instead, a metal door opened, and he was pushed down a long staircase, roughly 100 feet underground, into what he would learn was another artery of Hamas’s tunnel network. He was told he would spend four or five days underground. Instead, he was held captive in the narrow, airless underground maze for 23 months.

He described periods of repeated beatings – struck in the face and back, and once pinned by the legs and beaten with a piece of wood. Psychological torment accompanied the physical: guards regularly told him that his wife, son, and mother were dead, killed in rocket strikes or illness. One captor even knelt to pray that Elkana’s son would die.

Yosef Chaim Ohana spent his first few weeks as a hostage in an apartment. Like the others, he was starved and threatened constantly. “During the first weeks we were tied up, blindfolded, pressed to the floor, naked, with a fan blowing on us to cool us down. Every small thing ended with beatings. If you asked to urinate – you were beaten. If you asked to be covered, they would take a carpet, put it on you, and step on you. There were times when they urinated on the carpet, and we were lying on their urine.

“They put handcuffs on me for a period of time, and they didn’t have the key. My hand swelled up, and I was about to lose all feeling in it. On the day I started begging them to release my hand because I felt like I was losing it, they simply went and brought bandages, brought a knife, and told me, ‘Fine, we’ll cut your hand off now – you’ve driven us crazy.’ They didn’t cut off my hand, but I understood there was no one to talk to, so I simply stopped complaining,” he said.

Aviva Siegel was bound for 51 days before she was released during a ceasefire in November of 2023. Until she was freed, she was held with Keith and other Israelis – including young girls she protected including one who was sexually assaulted by Hamas. “One of the girls came back from the bathroom after one of the Hamas terrorists touched most of her body. She’s young, and she was shaking, and I’ll never, ever forget that moment I got up and gave her a hug. And when he [the terrorist] came into the room and he saw me hugging her, he started screaming, and I felt like, in a second, he’s going to just kill her, and kill me, just for hugging her. And then, after a couple of hours, she told us what happened, and she said that if he would know that she’s telling us what happened, he said that he would kill her,” she recalled.

On occasion, Aviva was pulled by her hair and thrown around by her Hamas captors. Bathroom breaks were rare. “Showering” for the hostages meant given a bottle of water with a hole in a cap every few weeks. Food and water were minimal – she lost 22 pounds – and medicine was nonexistent. The one constant seemed to be the brutality Hamas displayed. She described the wanton violence perpetrated by Hamas on the kidnapped Israelis.

“One of the days, one of the girls was called out, and a Hamas terrorist with a gun in front of her eyes, told her to get dressed. And while she bent down to pick up a hijab – because we had to be dressed like Arabs while we were moving – she said that she’s scared that they’re going to take her, she’s going to be alone. And while she said that, he threw on the floor and put the gun in front of her eyes and said, ‘One more word, I’m going to kill you.’ And they took her and they said that she was lying, and they beat her to pieces,” Aviva said. “She was sitting and crying like a baby, I never forget the way she was red all over, and her hair was standing. They covered her with a blanket, and they handcuffed her, and they were just beating her.”

Keith also witnessed brutal beatings, and the torture of a young Israeli woman.

One day, Keith was brought into a dungeon where an Israeli woman was being tortured. They had falsely accused her of being an IDF officer and insisted that Keith convince her to confess.

Said Keith, “I saw this woman lying on her back, on the floor. Her hands were tied together and her feet were tied together, and they had covered her mouth, and they like propped her up behind her knees or under her knees … and two of the terrorists were beating her with a rod, and they took turns.

“I was standing next to this woman, and he [the Hamas terrorist] came around, and he put a rod to her forehead. So, he was standing behind this woman, and like with the rod, applying pressure to this woman’s forehead. And I just did what they told me to do. I told her that she needs to confess, and I knew she had nothing to confess to. And then one of them had a pistol, and he put it to her head,” he said. “She was on her knees, and he put the pistol to her head, and he said, if she doesn’t confess, he’s going to kill her. This was right in front of us.”

After 51 days, Aviva was told there was a ceasefire and that she was being released – without Keith. Amid the turmoil of the exchange with the Red Cross, Palestinians flooded the Gaza roads and surrounded the van that would bring her back to Israel. “I’m very, very lucky to be alive, because on that day, I could have been killed,” she recalled. Hamas and other Gazans were blocking the roads and throwing rocks at the Red Cross convoy. Meanwhile, inside the van, Aviva comforted Elma Avraham, 85, who had been taken from Kibbutz Nahal Oz, and was in serious condition. Avraham had lost half of her body weight, and her face was turning purple.

Said Aviva, “She couldn’t hold her head up, and when I touched her, she was freezing cold. So, I asked them for a blanket, and I started massaging her body and shouting at her that she needs to keep alive for her family, kids and grandchildren. I didn’t even know when I was massaging her some of the times that she was alive, but I continued doing that for a couple of hours, and when I arrived to Israel, I was very worried about it, because I wasn’t sure that she made it. She came to Israel, her body temperature was 28 degrees [Celsius], and the doctor said that if she would have come a little while later, she would have been dead.”

Back in Israel, Aviva appeared in shock. She had thought that her son, Shai, had been killed on October 7 and was overjoyed when she learned he had survived the attack. She reunited with her three daughters and grandchildren. Despite her wounds from October 7, and what she suffered in captivity, she began campaigning immediately for Keith and the other hostages’ release. Within two weeks, she flew to the U.S. and met with President Joe Biden, and the U.S. Senate and for more than a year made several trips to the White House. (In the recently released documentary about Melania Trump, she is seen being comforted by the First Lady.)

In Gaza, Keith tried to focus on the positive – even as he was being starved and in the process of losing 60 pounds. The beatings continued – and over the 16 months he was held, he was moved 33 times. Wherever he was taken, he remembers seeing guns and other deadly weapons.

“There were always weapons; rifles just there, visible. And one of the places I was held in, there were hand grenades – seven – I counted them. They were always on a table next to the bed. And the rifles were like leaned up against a wall, or propped on the wall, you know, with the magazine in and RPG, like just lying on the bed. There was a bed and RPG missiles, just like lying there, and pistols,” he told me. “I remember now in one of the apartments we were in with Aviva, with three young children aged like three, two and under a year there, and one day, the three-year-old girl was like walking around with a real pistol in her hand. I went into the toilet one day and there was a pistol just there on the shelf in the toilet.

So, I like remember thinking, you know, I need to tell them that the pistol is there. Somebody forgot it, or maybe they didn’t, I don’t know what, but, you know, I feel like it’s my responsibility to let them know that the pistol is there. Just thinking like, you know, I want to be of some benefit to them. If that makes sense.”

NOTHING WAS predictable with Hamas, and at any given moment Keith could be threatened. There was a time when a terrorist picked up a rifle and aimed it at him and other Israelis. Several times he was told he would be killed by a Hamas terrorist brandishing a knife. Another time, a month after Aviva was released, one of the Hamas guards approached him screaming. “He spat on me, and he cursed me, and he kicked me in my ribs, on my right side, and on my legs,” Keith said.

And another time, a terrorist seemed to lose his mind in front of him – first threatening to kill Keith and then turning the pistol on himself.

“One of them threatened to kill me. He pointed a pistol at me. We were like, right next to each other, lying down, and he handed me the pistol, and he said, ‘Take it.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to take it.’ He said, ‘Take it. Take it.’ I said, ‘No, no, I don’t want to take it.’ And then he pointed at me, and he said, ‘Now I’m going to kill you.’ And he said, ‘Now you’re dead. And then he took it and he put it – this is a real pistol with the magazine and bullets inside of it – and then he put it to his forehead, and he said, ‘Now I’m going to kill myself.’

“Anyway, I was just like feeling, OK, you know, if he’s going to kill me, he’s going to kill me. But I think I was more worried about what would happen if he killed himself, and the other terrorists would think that I had killed him, and then what would happen to me. That’s weird, but I think that was more scary: thinking that he would kill himself, than he would kill me.”

During his 16 months as a Hamas hostage, Keith was held alone for six months – much of the time in the dark. On one brief occasion, he was able to glimpse the sky and felt a sense of hope. Back in the darkness, he turned to his Jewish roots and remembered Hebrew prayers he had hummed during his childhood in Chapel Hill. He began to recite the Shema. “I think my Jewish identity and faith changed,” he told me when I visited him and his wife in their temporary home near the Sea of Galilee. “I would say the blessing before eating. I would say Shabbat Shalom, Shavua Tov, Shema Yisrael – you know, the whole Shema. And that became a daily thing that I would do over and over again, just throughout the day. And I also had a lot of thoughts about the Jewish people, my belonging to the Jewish people, and that was inspiring … I think I felt God, or I received strength and I was empowered.”

He also practiced mindfulness – which allowed him to focus on the moment while producing a sense of calm. And he began to think of his family, and send messages of hope to them during his meditations. The goal was to let his loved ones know that he was OK. He first began with his mother – who died while he was in captivity – and then continued to send love to his wife, Aviva, and four children and five grandchildren, and his siblings. “So I did that, but I also was practicing a lot of gratitude, you know, appreciating everything that I had, that I was alive and my body was in one piece,” he said.

Siegel said one of the keys to his survival was upholding his ethics. Even as his captives tortured him, and tried to convert him to Islam, he remained respectful. During his 16 months in captivity, he was held by 60 different Hamas members and he said he tried to interact with them on a level that steered away from religion, politics or ideology or anything that would create negative feelings.

“I was trying to keep it positive,” said Keith. “I feel blessed. I feel grateful to have had a loving family that gave me a lot of strength; belonging to the Jewish people, which gave me a lot of strength. The fact that I’m Jewish gave me a lot of strength and mindfulness, which I practiced, which also was very beneficial to me. So, I mean, I think it’s very, very useful tool. I came to realize how helpful it could be to me in an extreme situation.”

On Feb. 1, 2025 – during the first ceasefire since his wife Aviva Siegel was released, and after being held for 484 days – Keith Siegel was paraded on a Hamas stage before a jeering group of Hamas gunmen. At 5 foot 10 inches, he had lost 60 pounds and was escorted by machine-gun toting Hamas terrorists who were draped in black, their faces covered with balaclavas. At 65, he was on his way back home. Soon, he would make the first of eight trips to America – including three visits with President Donald Trump. His goal? To bring back all of the hostages from Gaza.

In January, when I visited Keith in the Galilee, the 20 remaining living hostages had been released three months earlier. And late last month, the last hostage held – the body of Ran Gvili, an Israeli policeman killed on October 7 – was returned.
When I asked him how he felt, he replied: “I have all sorts of unpleasant body sensations, including pain and other weird sensations, but again, it’s not present in my conscious every second. It comes and goes.”

For Elkana Bohbot and Yosef Chaim Ohana, their odyssey would continue for another seven months after Keith Siegel’s release – 738 days after the October 7 Hamas attack. Their release seemed surreal to them – back in Gaza, not a morning went by when each wondered if it would be their last day on earth.

Elkana spent 23 months in the tunnels – sometimes alone, sometimes with other hostages, like Yosef Chaim Ohana. Each morning he’d awake with the same dread … and hope. “I didn’t see any light, there was no air – nothing. I was like a dead man, a dead man with a beating heart. That’s what you feel. Nobody can help you. Nobody can listen to you. You get depressed, you get very sad, but you have to be optimistic,” he told me.

The beatings and psychological warfare continued. He was forced by Hamas to do propaganda videos – including a fake suicide where Hamas drew blood from him and beat him. When he’d ask for food, the gunmen forced him to watch Hamas propaganda footage of Israeli soldiers being killed in combat. Barefoot, and dressed in rags, he said he was thrown around like a garbage bag.

The starvation and abuse got worse during his last six months underground, before his release in October. One day, one of the terrorists approached Elkana and the other Israeli hostages in their tiny cell with a boxcutter. “He said, ‘I need to take one finger to the boss, to the commander. And because many [Palestinian] kids died today, we want to have, like blood for blood, so we want one finger.’ And everybody was like, ‘No, don’t do it, please.’ You know, we cried for a long time. And he said, ‘I won’t choose. You can choose between you who will take the finger.’’’ After almost an hour of pleading with the gunman, he left but threatened to return.

YOSEF CHAIM OHANA said the worst part of his 738 days in captivity was the psychological warfare Hamas employed.

“Everyone copes differently with psychological torture,” he said in a calm, steady voice. “With physical torture – when they come and lash you with a belt or a stick, on the legs and the back – everyone reacts the same way: screaming and begging, ‘Enough! Why?’

“But when they come and tell you, OK, it’s possible that your time is coming, or that we might execute you, or suddenly they call your name – for example, one of the hardest things is the absence of food, and there is no escaping that.

“Hunger – you feel it in your body. When you’re hungry, you’re hungry. You can’t escape it. You need food to survive. And they played with us using that – not once a month, not once every two weeks, not for two or three days. It was a game – from the very first day until the very last day. Even in the days before the deals, when they gave us more food – OK, so we’d gain weight and look better – even then it was done in a twisted, torturous way.

“We didn’t know why it was happening, when it would happen. They’d come and take it away from you. You hadn’t eaten all day, and then in the evening you’d go – there was this kind of lamp they had, and they’d flash the light, and then you knew that two people had to walk toward the light to get the food. It was like a dog experiment: every time there’s a bell, food arrives, and the dog starts salivating just from hearing the bell. That’s how it was in the tunnel.

“When the light would flash, something in us would release. You’d come alive. You knew that in a moment you’d eat.”

But often there was no food waiting for them. While he was in the process of losing 44 pounds, there always seemed to be food for the terrorists, who often ate complete meals in front of the starving Israelis.

“Then two people would go out toward the captors to take the food. And they’d look at us like it was a joke and ask, ‘What are you doing here? Go back!’ They would let us think they were bringing us food. We’d walk all the way over to them, believing they were about to give us something to eat – and then we wouldn’t get anything,” he said. “You just collapse onto the floor, not knowing what to do.”

But he knew that to survive he’d have to pick himself up right away.

“So maybe on the occasions when they called us to come get food and we came back empty-handed, I would tell myself: ‘How amazing those 10 minutes were, when I thought we were going to have food.’ I truly tried to see the good in everything. That’s how I behaved. If I hadn’t managed to see something good – I wouldn’t have been able to survive.”

And then there were the constant threats, with a gun pressed against his body.

“One time, I went to use the bathroom. A Hamas soldier came up, loaded his weapon,

stuck it into my back, and said, ‘That’s it. I don’t need you anymore.’ I thought he might be joking – but what are you supposed to think when there’s a loaded gun pointed at your back?” he said.

He does not downplay the beatings, which he still suffers from to this day.

“Every day when they came in there was this kind of ritual, like a morning ceremony. They would approach us, and we already understood what was about to happen. We would take off our shirts and press ourselves against the wall. Face to the wall. And they would beat us on the back with their hands, with rings, with sticks,” he said.
One time he and other Israelis were singled out and brought to an area where they were beaten until they were unconscious.

“They covered our eyes. We were two out of the group,” he recalled. “Each of us is given a very strong blow to both ears so that we lose our balance and fall. We fall to the floor. They insult us, grab our legs, and tie them to a single strong stick. One of them knew a bit of English and Hebrew and explained, saying that now they are taking revenge on us for what we did to them, and now we will feel in our own flesh what they do.

“My mind immediately says: ‘OK, they’re going to cut our legs to break us, maybe even kill us.’ They step on our heads, on our hands, kick us. Then the legs are tied into the stick – it’s a kind of an Islamic punishment, but one that doesn’t leave marks.

“It’s basically whipping the soles of the feet with a long stick. The soles of the feet are an area full of nerves, so the pain isn’t just in the legs – when they hit your feet, the pain spreads through your whole body.”

He was left to recover in the darkness. All the while, he witnessed Hamas’s indifference to the suffering of the residents of Gaza, who were used as human shields. “One of the reasons it’s extremely hard to reach their generals, and even more so the lower-level fighters, is that every senior commander made sure to keep one or two hostages with him as human shields. And this is their method of fighting. They use human shields – not only hostages, but their own civilians as well. They choose to place command centers beneath hospitals, using hospitals as protection.”

He described the intimidation he witnessed. “In the last two months, I was alone, inside the headquarters of almost all the senior commanders in the central area – Deir al-Balah, Al-Bureij. I understood Arabic well. The way they operated during that period of the war, and I’m sure it was always like this, there’s a rulebook. If they ask you to do something – bring money, hand over your car, leave your home – and you refuse, they come and take it by force. And if you say something they don’t like, and Hamas hears about it, they break one of your knees,” he said.

“If they find out that you took food without going through them, they come and confiscate it. And if you refuse, they break both of your knees. I heard a commander – and I understand Arabic – sending one of his fighters and saying: ‘Go break his knee. But do it properly.’”

He wondered why, after October 7, the world does not understand their goals – which he believes go far beyond the destruction of Israel.

“If this is how they treat their own civilians, so how do you expect them to treat us? And all the lies about how, ‘If they’re given their own state, they’ll stop killing’ – that’s not true. Their goal is not just to take Israel. Their goal is an Ottoman-style empire. Their dream is to unite and control the world.

“Even now, after the war, after seeing the damage to their own civilians and what happened here – the only thing they focus on is how to do it again and stay in control. Step by step. They live for this. They are patient,” he said. “They live, with their whole being, to repeat October 7. So anyone who shows compassion toward Hamas is agreeing with their vision – to conquer the world, to murder, to kidnap, to rape.”

What’s it like to live in a Hamas tunnel?

“Down there, there’s no air-conditioning,” he said. “In the summer, you can’t breathe – there’s no oxygen. You’re sealed inside an enclosed space, and it reaches 45 degrees Celsius, like being inside an oven. In the winter, you freeze and shiver, and they don’t give you clothes.”

He believes he has to tell his own story now to heal, and also because the media and western democracies have all but forgotten about what Hamas did on October 7 and how they treated the hostages.

“It must not be forgotten – by anyone. Two years since October 7. A terrible day. At first, everyone supported our recovery. Now, only two years later, people are denying it ever happened. Right now, I carry this period with me – these two terrible years – for two reasons. First, it’s the way back to life. To remember that this, too, was part of my life. And that I need to grow from it, to become stronger. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

“If I survived, then what I went through can be remembered, not erased. Because I believe that if I suppress it, if I try to forget this period, it will remain as trauma – PTSD that will never leave me.”

DESPITE THE TORTURE they endured, Yosef Chaim Ohana, Elkana Bohbot and Keith Siegel all believe that there can be peace with the Palestinians – as long as Hamas is eradicated.
Keith Siegel says he prays for peace.

“Peace has been made between Israel and bitter enemies. It is possible, and I personally am willing and wanting to engage with any person that wants peace, and personally willing to work hard at reaching peace,” he said. “I dream of a world where children can live, will live in peace, safety and security, and I feel like it’s my responsibility to help make that happen.”

“I believe deeply in peace. Peace is possible with civilians in Gaza and the West Bank. But with Hamas – and its ideology of global domination – there can be no peace,” said Yosef Chaim.

Said Elkana, “When you make peace, you do it with the enemy. So yes, why not? We want peace. We don’t want to fight. I believe that most people in Israel want peace and don’t want to fight. But when something happens like the seventh of October, we cannot sit by our side and be quiet.”

Meanwhile, for former hostages like Elkana, the psychological torment continues. Sometimes his wife finds him in the middle of the night or morning staring quietly at the sky, thinking of the 20 friends who were murdered on October 7, or the beatings he endured. And there is more stress – more than two years after their abduction, the four have no permanent housing, or work.

Yosef Chaim Ohana, Elkana Bohbot and Keith and Aviva Siegel never expected that their lives would change so suddenly and that their morals, values, relationships and overall philosophy about life would be tested by the torture and brutality that was inflicted upon them. The stories they shared are but a glimpse of what they experienced. There will be few epiphanies and little closure from the abuse they endured. But every waking moment offers them the promise of a new beginning, and if anything, these remarkable souls deserve just that. Θ

Steven A. Rosenberg is the editor of The Jewish Journal of Greater Boston. Email him at rosenberg@jewishjournal.org.