‘It could have been Keith’: Aviva Siegel says hostages’ murders sap her hopes for husband
She survived 51 days of Gazan captivity, but doesn’t know if her partner of 40 years is still alive, and what tortures he has undergone if he is
Jessica Steinberg, The Times of Israel's culture and lifestyles editor, covers the Sabra scene from south to north and back to the center
As released hostage Aviva Siegel listened to the parents of murdered captive Hersh Goldberg-Polin eulogize him, her mind turned to her husband who is still held in Gaza.
“It could have been Keith,” she thought.
Goldberg-Polin was one of six hostages who were murdered in a Hamas tunnel late last month and whose bodies were retrieved by Israeli forces on September 1.
“My heart was broken up into pieces for them,” said Siegel, speaking recently to The Times of Israel at the Hostages and Missing Families Forum headquarters in Tel Aviv. “I’ve been with them for months, so many hours, and so many times. I know Hersh because they’ve been talking about him. It’s a complete and utter shock for me.”
It’s been 10 months since Aviva Siegel was released from Hamas captivity on November 26. Fifty-one days earlier, she and her husband, Keith, 65, were taken hostage on October 7 from their home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza.
Within days of her release, despite a lingering stomach infection and deep exhaustion from her time in captivity, Siegel joined the nationwide rallies in support of the hostages, as well as a smaller circle of eight families of dual US citizens being held hostage.
Keith, her husband of over 40 years, is a US citizen who moved to Israel from North Carolina in 1980 and fell in love with Aviva, a South African immigrant who had moved to Israel as a child.
Since December, Siegel, along with the Goldberg-Polins and the other families of American citizens held in Gaza, has met with US administration officials in Israel and Washington more than a dozen times, pursuing every possible path to bring their loved ones home.
The news of the execution of Goldberg-Polin, Or Danino, Carmel Gat, Eden Alexander, Almog Sarusi and Alex Lobanov, with additional details later emerging of the inhumane conditions in which they were held, brought Siegel back to her own time in Gaza.
“I was in a tunnel just like that,” she said, pointing to a sketch of a winding passage that did not have enough room to stand up straight or air to breathe.
Siegel said she remembered looking at her captors as they descended into the tunnels on October 7 and thinking to herself, “These are terrorists, they’re not just people.”
“Every time something happened, I said to myself, ‘You’re going to go through worse things,’ and that’s what happened.”
There was discomfort, starvation, and utter terror during her time in captivity, alongside a deep fear for Keith and the other captives, which included young women who were held with them.
“It was too much for me when they hurt him, and they hurt his soul, and they hurt his heart and tortured him and threatened him and starved him,” said Siegel. “I could handle myself, but for me to see them do that to him, was beyond for me.”
Keith’s ribs were broken and his hand was shot during the initial Hamas attack on October 7. When the couple was brought to Gaza, they were given bandages and ointment, but no water to clean the wound.
“He just suffered,” said Siegel, who kept dousing his wound with ointment. “We were tortured all the time. They would make it as dark as possible — you couldn’t see a thing — and then they would shine a flashlight in my face.”
Sleep was impossible, with only snatches of rest for minutes at a time. Siegel said she does sleep now, but constantly dreams about Gaza.
“We were scared all the time about everything, always thinking, ‘They’re going to kill us,'” said Siegel. “They had their guns with them all the time, in front of us, just to see what reaction we would have. You had to say to them, ‘Tamam,’ which is like Arabic for thumb’s up, everything’s okay, even though nothing was okay.”
The young Israeli women who were kept captive alongside the Siegels became slaves of their captors, forced to clean and sweep for them, and constantly assaulted by the terrorists, blindfolded, and thrown around by their hair.
Siegel does not mention the young women by name as they are still held hostage, their fates unknown.
She is able to describe moments from those long, terrifying weeks in great detail.
There were days when they weren’t fed, or only given half a pita, often moldy. Siegel would often save bits of pita for Keith, wanting to keep his strength up.
She and her husband were moved 13 times during her 51 days of captivity, and at times they could see what Gaza looked like while being moved in a car, with hulking, unfinished buildings, trash everywhere, donkeys, dogs and cats in skeletal condition, and a terrible stink.
They saw mostly male captors during the weeks of captivity, although Siegel recalls being kept in one home with their captor’s wife and three children. At one point, the terrorist told his wife to pin a hijab Siegel had been forced to wear, putting the two women face to face.
“I looked straight into her eyes. I waited for her to look at me and to see all that was in my heart,” she said. “She looked back and I remember her eyes, I remember what she looked like. Maybe I also felt sorry for her, being there with him.”
The couple felt they were going to die, and that fear was with them all the time, said Siegel.
She hoped she would die first so that she wouldn’t have to see Keith dead beside her.
“And you just get the feeling that you’re forgotten,” she said. “Someone would ask what day it was, and on that particular day, it was day 35. And we used to look at each other in disbelief, thinking, it’s already been 35 days?”
At this she shook her head of gray curls, to think that it had now been some 10 times that number since October 7.
Following the recent headlines about the tunnels where Goldberg-Polin, Danino, Alexander, Lobanov, Gat and Sarusi were held, Siegel noted how many times she has described the same kinds of tunnels and conditions in recent months.
“I’ve been talking about these things,” she said, describing the stomach infection she had, her loss of 10 kilos (22 pounds) in 51 days, the bruises she received from her captors, and the lack of air to breathe underground.
“We didn’t have oxygen, we were just a couple of hours from dying, we couldn’t breathe,” she said. “We had to lie down and figure out if we’re going to live and just try and concentrate on that.”
Now, all these months later, Siegel wants to believe that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying everything he can to get the hostages out, but says she doesn’t see proof of it.
“I need Bibi because he’s the only one who will be able to take Keith out,” said Siegel, who describes herself as an apolitical person. “So if I lose hope in what’s happening, I’ll break up into pieces even more than I’m already broken up.”
And so she keeps active, speaking up for Keith and for the young women held hostage with them.
She isn’t sure her husband has survived until now, and even if he has, whether he will ever make it home.
And “no girl should be lying on a mattress, terrified that they’re going to be touched or raped again, hit, starved.”
The last time Aviva saw Keith was on the day she was released. The two were being held in separate rooms and hadn’t discussed what would happen if one of them was released before the other.
Keith had never mentioned to his Hamas captors that he was a dual US citizen, as he feared that the Americans might get him out and leave Aviva behind in Gaza.
As Aviva was being taken out of the apartment on that November day, she forcefully brushed past her captor to go to Keith and tell him to be strong for her, still unsure if she was going to be killed or released home.
“They had covered his eyes and Keith was shaking,” said Siegel. “I saw him just looking at the ceiling and he was very, very sad because he was alone.”
During the hours-long process of her release, Aviva was held with sevral Thai hostages who were also being released, in a huge space filled with Hamas terrorists. They were all dressed, she said, “like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” with green masks covering their faces.
She was then placed in a van with two young hostages, sisters Ela and Dafna Elyakim, who didn’t know their father had been killed on October 7 and had been waiting anxiously to tell someone that Ela’s finger, injured during their capture, was seen to by a Gazan veterinarian who didn’t use any pain medication.
Aviva also sat next to Elma Avraham, 84, who was near death after weeks in captivity, her legs bruised and swollen, her extremities cold, as Aviva massaged her and got her to drink some water (Elma was hospitalized in serious condition upon her return, but eventually recovered).
Even when Siegel finally saw an Israeli soldier and realized she was back in Israeli territory, her biggest fear aside from Keith’s survival was whether her son Shai, who also lived in Kfar Aza, was still alive after October 7.
“I asked, and somebody made a call and said, ‘You have four children,'” she said. “It wasn’t pure relief because of Keith, but I was just crying and crying and crying.”
Within days, Siegel was speaking publicly at rallies and at the Knesset, but it’s been harder to hold on to hope since the murder of the six, she said. She’s had thoughts that maybe it would be better to hope that Keith is no longer alive, given the torture he would have had to survive for the last 11-plus months.
“Maybe then he won’t suffer any longer, he won’t starve, he won’t be in such fear,” she said. “And then my sister said, ‘You’re crazy. You just need to pull yourself together and be strong. Keith is there, being strong to stay alive for you and the children.'”
