Gadi Mozes recounts 482 days of solitary captivity: ‘Everything was psychological abuse’

Gadi Mozes, who was freed by terrorists in Gaza in January as part of the hostage-ceasefire deal, said in an interview broadcast Thursday that in his 482 days of solitary captivity, “everything that happened to me was psychological abuse.”

“The depth of the fear, the depth of disconnection from the world, the depth of the unknown — it’s impossible to convey,” the Kibbutz Nir Oz farmer, 80, told Channel 12.

He added that his Palestinian Islamic Jihad captors “tried to depress me, tried to break me.”

“The entire time, I was on guard and focused only on how they won’t hurt me. How I survive,” said Mozes.

“I would calm myself down,” he said. “I would tell myself, ‘This will work itself out.’ But in retrospect… that was an illusion. I didn’t actually calm myself down.”

Mozes said he had wanted to be interviewed for a long time: “What’s urgent for me is my friends who are still there.”

“I know very well that I’m the only elderly man who survived and came back alive,” said Mozes. “I know very well the suffering and the torture faced by all the people who were there and have returned, the people who died and the people who are still there.”

Referring to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he asked: “The prime minister, does he want to hear from us? Does he understand what we feel? Does he want to understand what a sense of betrayal we feel, that the state abandoned us?”

“I think this prime minister has marked us as people he doesn’t see,” he said.

Mozes also assailed Netanyahu for failing to visit Kibbutz Nir Oz, since it was ravaged in the Hamas-led onslaught of October 7, 2023. Of the kibbutz’s approximately 400 residents, 117 were either killed or kidnapped and 14 are still being held in Gaza, including nine whose deaths have been declared by Israeli authorities.

Netanyahu has turned down multiple invitations from residents to visit the community, including from former hostages.

“Nobody should have to invite you. You should be the first one here,” said Mozes. “From all over the world, people come to us and want to help — maybe our government can also help us?”

Upon his return, he said, he was welcomed by President Isaac Herzog and the German ambassador, but not by anyone from the the government: “Not a single official representative from all those evil people said ‘welcome back.'”

Mozes was abducted from Nir Oz 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.

Much of the kibbutz, which Mozes helped found six decades ago, was burned to the ground. Mozes has vowed to help rebuild Nir Oz.

During the onslaught, Mozes left his home to defend his daughter Moran, who lived nearby and would survive the massacre.

Mozes said he was kidnapped at his doorstep by “three gorillas, two with guns, the third with a knife in his hand.”

The latter, said Mozes, “yells at me: ‘‘We’re not Hamas, we’re the Jihad.’ As if it matters if you’re killed by the Jihad or by Hamas.”

Unbeknownst to him at the time, terrorists also seized his partner of 20 years, Efrat Katz, as well as Katz’s daughter Doron Katz-Ahser and Doron’s two young girls Aviv and Raz, who were staying at the couple’s home that weekend.

Doron, Aviv and Raz were released in the weeklong truce-hostage deal of November 2023. Efrat Katz was killed by IDF helicopter fire on the vehicle they were abducted in, a military probe confirmed last week.

Speaking to Channel 12, Mozes said that when he left his home, he did not imagine that would be the last time he would see Katz alive.

His captor lied to him she was alive and free, Mozes said, cursing the man. Mozes said that on November 22, Katz’s birthday, he had asked to send greetings to Efrat, and that his captor pretended to agree to send her via WhatsApp “Happy Birthday, love you.”

The same thing would happen to Mozes’s daughter Moran’s birthday on December 29, he told Channel 12, adding that in both cases his captor falsely reported a jubilant response.

Roughly a month later, Mozes said, he learned about Katz’s death when he heard on the radio that there would be a military probe into the circumstances of her death. He recalled being distraught, and furious at his captor.

“My world came crashing down,” said Mozes. “I realized he had lied to me, and I threw the radio at him and said: ‘You liar!'”

Mozes said that from that day he “decided” Moran was also dead so that he would not suffer another such “heavy hammer to the head.” When Mozes returned to Israel, he was overjoyed to learn she was alive.

In captivity, Mozes was referred to as “Hajj.” He was fed twice a day — pita with beans in the morning and pita with rice in the afternoon. He soon began asking whoever served his food what time it was, and marking the timestamp on the shadow cast from the cell’s small window.

Turning the wall into a makeshift sundial “occupied me for about six months,” he said.

At one point, his captor shoved porridge at him, which Mozes refused to eat. “Suddenly I saw him put silicon gloves on his hands,” said Mozes. “I started saying to myself, what, is he going to strangle me? Force-feed me?”

“He punched me on the shoulder and said, ‘You’ll eat,'” Mozes said. “I told him: ‘Listen, one more time you touch me, I’ll rain death blows on you, I don’t care what those weapons will do to me, but you won’t touch me.”

“Whatever the cost, I won’t let him humiliate me,” he said.

Mozes was held in 10 different locations, including near the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, where thousands of displaced Gazans had sought shelter. He was taken to a school in the area.

“Horrible sights,” he said. “Thousands of people, refugees who had fled from bombings, lying like sardines in the halls, on the floor.”

Asked if he felt mercy for them, Mozes said he did not.

“I saw a sight that was not normal, but I didn’t feel any emotion,” he said. “I didn’t care about anything. I’m also suffering like them.”

According to Channel 12, Mozes was also held in the designated humanitarian zone of Al-Mawasi during the massive Israeli airstrike there that killed Hamas military chief Muhammad Deif in July.

“My captor explains to me, ‘There is one thing you don’t understand about Islam,'” said Mozes. “‘I’m required to protect you before I protect myself. But be aware that if your army comes to save you — first we’ll shoot you and then defend ourselves.”

Mozes said he didn’t want the army to launch a rescue mission to save him: “I said to myself, ‘I’ve suffered so much, why, to be returned in a coffin?'”

Mozes’s release was part of the most recent Gaza ceasefire deal’s 42-day first phase, which saw Hamas return 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 in connection with the murders of dozens of Israelis.

The fighting resumed on Tuesday, with 59 hostages still in Gaza, 24 of whom are still believed to be alive.

Mozes, who said he tried to avoid conflict with his captors and recalled that on the day he was released when PIJ tried to get him to flash a V-sign for a propaganda video, he refused outright.

“I said to myself, ‘I’m not giving them a victory image, screw everything,'” he said.

Before Mozes’s captors handed him over to the Red Cross on January 30, they filmed a propaganda clip of him praising them, he told Channel 12.

They took him to a cemetery, where they stood him in front of an open grave with two guns fixed on him, said Mozes. He recalled thinking about his family in what he was sure were his final moments.

From his captors, he said, there was “not a word — complete silence.”

“Then, suddenly, they started asking me, ‘Is it true the Jihad’s food was good?’ I said, ‘Good? Fantastic! I’ve never eaten such good rice,'” said Mozes. “‘And is it true they treated you well?’ I said: ‘Extremely well…’ It was all scripted and taped,” he said.

“I don’t know if I can convey to you the feeling of fear, of terror — I was shaking. I was so scared in front of that pit,” said Mozes. “And then they said, okay, get up into their car, we’re going.”

Mozes was handed over to the Red Cross in Khan Younis along with Arbel Yehoud, 28, a fellow member of Kibbutz Nir Oz who was also held in solitude by the PIJ. Their car was surrounded by thousands of Gazans, many of them gunmen, in a terrifying crush during a propaganda ceremony that Israel would later slam.

“The noise was deafening. What you saw on television was nothing,” said Mozes. “They kept pushing, the car was swinging.”

Yehoud was the first to exit the vehicle.

The captors “opened the door and told her, ‘come,’ and I was thinking I would lose my mind,” Mozes told Channel 12. “I didn’t see anything, just a mass of people… I was scared to death that they had given her to the masses.”

An hour later, Mozes left the vehicle. “I said to myself, ‘That’s it, they’ve swallowed Arbel and now they’ll swallow me.'”

The stoic octogenarian, who appeared to flash half a smile as he waded through the crowd, said: “You could see on my face that I looked hysterical.”

Speaking from Nir Oz, just east of Gaza, Mozes said looking at the Strip “makes my heart stop.”

“When I look west, I just lose it because I know that’s where [Hamas] came from,” he said. “It’s very difficult for me to look westward.”

Mozes, a lifelong leftist on the political spectrum, said he felt conflicted after the Hamas onslaught.

“I think peace is made only with enemies,” he said. “What other option is there? That my grandchildren will also die there, be abducted?”

On the other hand, he said, “years and years of belief that we can get along, find a formula that will give room for everyone, have been shattered by this horrendous murder, the murder of my best friends, who all believed in that option.”