Ex-hostage Eliya Cohen says he and others tried to escape on their 1st day in Gaza

Freed hostage Eliya Cohen says he and other abductees tried to escape on their first day in captivity in Gaza.

As Israel started striking the Strip and flattened a building where they were initially held, another warning of an impending bombing caused the captors to leave Cohen and several others alone, he tells Ynet.

“I looked at the hostages who were with me. I didn’t even know their names yet, and I told them: ‘Let’s escape’. You can call it an instinct, maybe a gut feeling. And we just started running in the street,” he recounts.

However, they were quickly stopped by a Gazan man who identified them as Israelis. The person who had been guarding them then showed up and argued with the other Gazan, before they decided to take the hostages to hide in a grocery store, before they were taken back to the ruins of the home and kept there for two months.

Then they were taken into underground tunnels, where ironically, Cohen felt safer since “the only consolation was knowing I wouldn’t die from a missile.”