Freed hostage Agam Berger says hearing debate over ceasefire made captives feel ‘our lives weren’t worth enough’

Agam Berger, an IDF surveillance soldier who was kidnapped on October 7 and freed last month, says it was hard while in captivity to hear about the debate in Israel over the costs of a deal to bring the hostages home.

“It’s not their fault that they were kidnapped, they need to know that people are fighting for them,” Berger says in an interview with Kan public radio, about suggestions that the price of a ceasefire deal was “too high.”

“We have to pay a price, but we have to keep fighting for the [hostages left behind]… the young men are being abused in a different way,” she says.

Hearing about such a debate while in captivity made us “feel like our lives weren’t worth enough.” However, she says, they heard senior officials saying they were ready to pay the price of a deal, and that gave them hope.

Berger says that in January 2024 they were given things that IDF troops left behind, including a siddur prayerbook and a newspaper which “gave us some answers” about the situation in Israel.

But she says that after the rescue by IDF troops of Shlomo Ziv, Noa Argamani, Andrey Kozlov and Almog Meir Jan in June 2024, her captors took away their radio, cutting off much of their access to news.

When Berger was left alone in captivity after her four comrades were freed, she says she asked herself “Is there a ceasefire? Am I going home? I believed in it, but it was still a surprise to be told that in two days I’d be home.” She says she wasn’t allowed to take anything back with her, including a notebook she and Liri had written in while in captivity.

She says she was forced to dress in the fake IDF uniform they gave her and to film videos thanking her captors: “In that moment I couldn’t say what I wanted to, I did what I could but I didn’t care, the main thing was that I was going home.”