Ex-hostage recalls her final moments with Tsahi Idan: ‘They told him he’d return with us’
Hagar Brodutch says on her last day in Gaza, in November 2023, their captors ‘brutally pulled him away from us and took him — to this today I don’t know where’
A former hostage who was briefly held alongside slain hostage Tsahi Idan has recounted her final ominous moments with him in captivity.
Idan was buried Friday, a day after his body and three others were brought back from Gaza. He was taken alive from his home in Kibbutz Nahal Oz on October 7, 2023, and Israel says he was murdered in captivity.
Hagar Brodutch, kidnapped from Kibbutz Kfar Aza with her three children, was released in the November 2023 ceasefire. Prior to her and her kids’ release, they spent a short time with Idan.
“In the final days in hell, they told him he’d return with us [under the deal], she told Channel 12. “On the last day, they brutally pulled him away from us and took him — to this today I don’t know where.”
Brodutch said: “We were locked together in a small room. They put a table between him and me so we wouldn’t talk. In the morning, one of the terrorists told us in broken English that they were going to film us for videos in which we would talk about ourselves, and then they would take us for release.
“We practiced what we needed to say, mainly to pass the time,” she related. “The kids were too shy to say their names and how old they were. After an hour, they took him to an adjacent room. I was sure the goal was to film the aforementioned video. After minutes in which Tsahi didn’t return, my stomach turned. I asked them again and again where Tsahi was, and then I understood that he probably wouldn’t return, and maybe neither would we.”
Upon her return, Brodutch spoke with Tsahi’s wife Gali to tell her of her meeting with her husband.
“It was important to pass on the message… Tsahi and I were together for a short time, 48 hours in total, but in the hell of those short hours and the encounter with another Israeli adult, it was a lifetime,” she said.
“My time in captivity is far from behind me. We live the captivity every minute.”
Brodutch said it would be hard for her to look Gali in the eyes now, calling her “a brave woman going through the worst thing in the world.”
“Sometimes there’s nothing to say,” she stated. “Her husband could have returned alive, they all could have… The country abandoned us. All 59 remaining hostages should come back tomorrow.”
Hundreds attended Idan’s funeral service Friday as it set out from Bloomfield Stadium, home to the Hapoel Tel Aviv soccer team, of which Idan was a big fan. He was later buried at Kibbutz Einat beside Maayan, his daughter who was murdered on October 7.
Relatives of Idan asked him to forgive them for not managing to bring him home alive, and assailed the Israeli government for its failure to do so.
Tsahi Idan’s body was returned to Israel overnight Wednesday, along with the bodies of hostages Itzik Elgarat, Ohad Yahalomi and Shlomo Mantzur.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Office said Elgarat, Idan and Yahalomi were murdered in captivity, while Mantzur, 86, was murdered during the Hamas onslaught and his body snatched to Gaza.
