Farhan al-Qadi says he was taken hostage because he refused to point Hamas to Jews
Rescued hostage describes being shot and captured and his 11-month ordeal; report says slain captive Eden Yerushalmi had been starved in captivity, body weighed only 36 kgs
Farhan al-Qadi, who was taken hostage by Hamas on October 7 and rescued by IDF troops last week, told Channel 12 News on Wednesday that he was abducted because he refused to show Hamas terrorists where they could find Jews during their massacre of some 1,200 people in southern Israel.
In an interview with the broadcaster, al-Qadi retraced his last 11 months, from when he was taken hostage while at work near Kibbutz Magen by the Gaza border until his rescue.
When the sirens started on October 7 al-Qadi thought it was another standard volley of rockets of the sort frequently fired at Israel from Gaza, until his brother phoned him and told him there had been a terrorist infiltration, he told the channel.
“I went outside and I saw 100 meters from me where three Hamas terrorists were shooting in my direction and running toward me,” he said.
Al-Qadi said they caught him and tested him to make sure he was a Muslim and then said to him, “Take us in your car to wherever we can find Jews.”
“I was prepared to die rather than point them to a Jew, not even to a cat. The whole moshav are good friends of mine,” al-Qadi told Channel 12.
When he refused to show them where Jews might be, the terrorists shot him in the leg, knocked him to the ground, and tied his hands behind his back.
Al-Qadi was then thrown into a car and taken to Gaza where he saw a group of foreign workers being taken down into a tunnel. At this point, his leg was in so much pain he couldn’t walk and one of the terrorists decided to take him to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.
Since he couldn’t walk, al-Qadi was forced to climb up the stairs in the hospital on all fours. As they watched him, he said, they laughed and said, “Look, here’s our dog walking.”
“There were a lot of people and you could see their joy; they felt like they’d won,” al-Qadi recalled.
Eventually, he was taken to see two doctors who sewed up his injury without anesthetic while interrogating him.
“I told that the pain in my soul was worse than the pain in my leg. I was thinking of my family and how they wouldn’t have Farhan anymore,” he said.
After his leg was sewn up, al-Qadi was taken to the same room as 85-year-old diabetic Aryeh Zalmanovich, a hostage from Nir Oz who was injured in his head and hand.
The two were kept in the same room for a month and a half, with Zalmanovich in the bed and al-Qadi sitting in the chair.
“He told me stories. He had a granddaughter he loved so much and two sons who live up north, and he talked about them every chance he got,” al-Qadi recalled, adding that some mornings Zalmanovich would tell him he had dreamed the two had been released together.
Eventually, al-Qadi was moved to a different room alone, and Zalmanovich was moved to the same room a week later. Over the next few days, al-Qadi said, Zalmanovich’s health deteriorated drastically and he barely spoke.
“The day he died, at around noon, he started to talk. I got up and went closer to him, and he was saying goodbye to the kibbutz, goodbye to his friends, goodbye to his granddaughter… It broke me. I tried to talk to him, I was calling him ‘Aryeh, Aryeh,’ but nothing. He wasn’t hearing me. And then it was all over,” said al-Qadi, adding that he had come to feel like Zalmanovich was his family.
A couple of hours later, al-Qadi was taken into a room with Zalmanovich’s body, two Hamas terrorists, and a videographer and was ordered to say that Zalmanovich had been gravely ill and they had done everything they could to help him.
A few weeks later, al-Qadi was moved to a house in Khan Younis that was destroyed in an airstrike the next morning. Hamas then waited until civilians began evacuating from the city to camouflage al-Qadi among them, and he was taken to a tent that was kept closed.
From there, al-Qadi was taken to a tunnel that was accessed under a house, where he spent the next eight months.
Al-Qadi told Channel 12 that he spent that time sleeping and reading the Quran.
“I thought to myself that if this was how I was being treated as a Muslim, how were the Jews being treated?” he said.
He asked at some point to be with some other hostages but was refused because they saw him as a traitor and an enemy worse than the Jewish Israelis.
“Had you told us where there were Jews, you would have stayed with your family,” he was told.
He was found and rescued by IDF troops last week, and he said the soldiers welcomed him warmly but the welcome he got back in Israel was not as warm.
Al-Qadi described being criticized and threatened over the last week after the right-wing Channel 14 quoted him saying that he saw himself as Palestinian more than Israeli. In fact, what he had said was that it didn’t matter whether someone was Israeli or Palestinian; everyone deserved to be free.
“It really hurts me,” he said. “I was shot in the leg because I didn’t want to give up Jews. That’s how we grew up, that’s how my grandfather grew up, and it’s how my children are growing up. Ninety percent of the residents in Israel, Muslims, Jews, Bedouins, are together, one family, one people, Jewish and Arab. No one can take away that togetherness,” he said.
Having experienced the prolonged captivity himself, al-Qadi ended his interview with a call to get the hostages released.
“Get them out of there, and then do whatever you want, [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu,” he said, adding that while he was free and happy to be back with his family, his head was still in Gaza.
Channel 12 also reported on Wednesday that Eden Yerushalmi, whose body was recovered from Gaza over the weekend along with five others after they were murdered a day or two before the army reached them, appeared to have been starved and had lost 10 kilos in captivity, weighing only 36 kilos (79 lbs) when she was recovered.
Ninety-seven of the 251 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza, including the bodies of at least 33 confirmed dead by the IDF.
Hamas released 105 civilians during a weeklong truce in late November, and four hostages were released before that. Eight hostages have been rescued by troops alive, and the bodies of 37 hostages have also been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the military as they tried to escape their captors.
Hamas is also holding two Israeli civilians who entered the Strip in 2014 and 2015, as well as the bodies of two IDF soldiers who were killed in 2014.
