Former hostage Arbel Yehoud says captors threatened to kill her if IDF approached

Former hostage Arbel Yehoud, who was returned to Israel in January as part of a Gaza ceasefire agreement, says her Palestinian Islamic Jihad captors made it clear to her that they would kill her if the IDF discovered their location and came to rescue her.

“I’m sitting next to them with loaded guns and know that they’ll shoot me in the head first thing if the army comes in,” Yehoud, 29, told Channel 13 in an interview broadcast Monday, filmed in the ruins of the Kibbutz Nir Oz home she shared with Ariel Cunio, who is still in captivity.

When she got back to Israel in February, Yehoud said, she realized her worst night in Gaza was a year earlier, on February 12, 2024, when troops operating in the Rafah tent camp where she was being held carried out a daring operation to rescue hostages Louis Har and Fernando Marman.

“I saw flares on the other side of the tent canvas, and then the planes began,” she said. “Warplanes, which sounded very low and very close. The bombings started, and then I heard the shootouts and the running.”

During the rescue operation, she said, one of her captors “was with a loaded gun, aimed at the tent” where she was being held, Yehoud said.

“I don’t think there is a word that can describe the fear of the sound of fighting — the bombings, the planes, those few seconds of the sound before a missile drops, the shootouts,” she said. “That fear is paralyzing, it’s terrifying. You don’t know if you’ll still be breathing the next minute and where it will catch you.”

“Where was all that on October 7?” she asked. “You’re currently fighting to attack, and you didn’t fight to defend. That morning, there wasn’t a single plane until the moment I got to Gaza.”

Roughly one in four of Nir Oz’s 400-odd members was kidnapped or murdered on October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel to kill some 1,200 people and take 251 hostages, sparking the war in Gaza. Terror groups in Gaza are believed to still be holding 24 living hostages, including Ariel Cunio and his older brother David Cunio, as well as the remains of 35 hostages, including a soldier killed fighting in the 2014 Gaza war.

The first time she cried in captivity, Yehoud said, was when she overheard a couple of words on Arabic radio about the “Nir Oz massacre.”

“They don’t like it when you cry,” she said, referring to her captors. “It’s not cool to cry there.”

“I just got used to it at some point. I stopped crying,” she said. “Tears would just flow, but no crying.”

“There were moments when I said to myself, enough, let’s get this over with,” she said. “There was a moment where I wrote ‘help’ in Hebrew and in English on my hand and pointed it up to the sky so I’d be discovered and have a rocket fall on me.”

Yehoud recalled that the night before the onslaught, she, her siblings and grandmother had a Shabbat dinner with David and Ariel’s parents in the kibbutz. “There was a lot of joy, sounds of children, good food as usual, and afterward when the Friday night meal was over we went to our friend’s place,” she said. “There were a few of us there. The next morning, 80% of the people there were no longer.”

Among those killed in Nir Oz on October 7 was Yehoud’s brother Dolev, who had rushed out of his home to try and save lives, and was presumed kidnapped until his remains were identified in Israel in June 2024. His wife Sigal gave birth to a baby girl two weeks later.

Yehoud, who was held in solitude by various PIJ-affiliated families for almost 500 days, said that part of the time she was held with a baby boy who made her think of her own nephews and of the niece she was yet to meet.

“There was a certain connection” with the baby, she said. “I took care of him a bit.”

Yehoud only learned while in captivity that her brother, with whom she would hold conversations in her head, had been killed in the Hamas onslaught.

“After a few pretty dark weeks, I spoke to him and reached a decision that I can’t grieve alone. I remember apologizing to him that I had to disconnect from the situation,” she said. “I haven’t visited his grave, and I don’t think I’ll be able to grieve and reckon with the loss until Ariel and everyone return.”

She and Ariel were kidnapped from their home in Nir Oz and separated on their way to Gaza, with the car carrying her going in one direction and the car carrying him going in another. Yehoud recalled looking out through the rearview mirror until the car carrying Ariel was out of sight.

She said she forced herself to learn Arabic while in captivity, and exchanged a few words in the language with her Channel 13 interviewer, Arab Israeli journalist Lucy Aharish. Yehoud said the only time she spoke out loud to herself in captivity was on the second day, when, in a low voice, she told herself: “Arbel, you’ve been abducted to Gaza, you’re in Gaza, you don’t know how long this is going to take, you need to be strong and patient.”

Nonetheless, she said, she would never have imagined that it would be 482 days until she returned. She recalled learning about the weeklong truce-hostage deal in November 2023, when Hamas released 105 women and children, and thinking to herself that she too would soon be free.

Being a woman alone in captivity was “another story,” said Yehoud, without elaborating. “There are things that will be revealed later on or that may never be revealed.” Some details Yehoud did not even share with her parents, she said. “It’s better they don’t know.”

In captivity, said Yehoud, she never felt clean, and was perpetually surrounded by “dirt, sand, mice scampering.”

“Early on, there was some mouse that bit my finger, and toward the end I was driven crazy by them,” she said. “There were a few times when some of the terrorists killed the mice, and toward the end, I found myself squashing mice.”

The tent camp in Rafah where she was held was “insanely hot” in the summer and “extremely cold” in winter, she said. Yehoud, who was barefoot her entire captivity, recalled that in the cold season she “tried to somehow improvise socks.”

For some six weeks before she was released, Yehoud had access to a television, and was able to watch the release of the first three captives set free in the ceasefire-hostage deal that was signed in January, she said.

The deal saw Hamas release 33 women, children, civilian men over 50 and those deemed “humanitarian cases,” in exchange for some 1,900 Palestinian prisoners, including over 270 serving life terms over the murders of dozens of Israelis.

The terror group violated the deal early on by failing to release Yehoud, a female civilian, before a group of female soldiers. In response, Israel temporarily blocked the agreed-upon return northward of displaced Gazans.

Amid the crisis, Yehoud became something of a celebrity in Gaza, and she repeatedly heard herself referred to as “the soldier Arbel Yehoud” in Arabic media reports, she said. It was then that she understood that she was about to be released.

In the days before her release, Yehoud’s captors forced her to appear in propaganda videos, including one in which she could be seen handing out sweets to Gazan children.

Another propaganda video showed her reunited with fellow Nir Oz member Gadi Mozes. It was her first genuine smile, and the first time she spoke Hebrew to another person, in nearly 16 months.

Yehoud, Mozes and five Thai nationals not included in the original agreement were released together that day. Yehoud recalled the 80-year-old Mozes making them all laugh by cracking jokes and “pulling off little dances” to keep warm while she and the Thais were wrapped in a blanket.

The release is remembered for the Gazan throngs who surrounded the captives’ vehicle. Yehoud, realizing her captors wanted to film the hostages walking through the crowd, said she pointed to the largest terrorist in the car and told him: “You, you’ll hold my hand.”

Walking through the crowd “felt like an eternity,” she said. “It got increasingly massive, with pushing and shoving.”

Yehoud was taken to a Red Cross representative who yanked her out of the crowd and pushed her into a van, she said. Asked if she drew a deep breath in the van, Yehoud responded: “I screamed.”

Speaking to Channel 13 in the ruins of her house in Nir Oz, Yehoud, who is currently living in the kibbutz’s temporary residence in Kiryat Gat, said it was important to her to be interviewed in the home she shared with Ariel.

“Ultimately we were kidnapped together, and if there is the slightest chance that he sees this, that he sees something of this, then it’s important to me that he knows that I’m waiting for him,” said Yehoud.

“It’s important to me that he sees that I’m in our home and that I’m not going anywhere until he returns.”