Ex-hostage Soussana credits Liri Albag with saving her life as captors tortured, threatened her

Amit Soussana, a hostage kidnapped to Gaza on October 7, 2023, and freed in a hostage deal in November of that year, says fellow captive Liri Albag, who was released on Saturday after 477 days, saved her life by convincing their terrorist captors that she, Soussana, was not an IDF officer.

In an interview with Channel 12’s “Uvda” investigative program, Soussana, 40, says the captors bound her hands and legs together while one beat her with a stick and the other threatened her with a sharp metal object, and demanded that she admit being in the military, claiming they had seen as such on TV.

She says the captors brought other hostages, including Albag, to ask her to come clean.

A guard told her, “You have 40 minutes to tell us the truth, or else I kill you,” while pointing a gun at her head, she says.

She says Albag talked to the guard and managed to persuade the captors that Soussana wasn’t in the military.

“I told her when she came back: ‘I don’t know if they would have killed me or not; as far as I’m concerned, you saved my life.'”

Soussana also says that in the first three weeks of her captivity, she was kept alone in an apartment with two guards who tied her legs with a metal chain and with two locks to a window, “like an animal.”

She again recounts the sexual assault she endured by one of the captors, a story she first revealed in an interview with The New York Times last year.