Freed hostage Karina Ariev at Hostages Square: ‘Start hoping again, because we’ll get you back’

Freed hostage Karina Ariev, a surveillance soldier snatched by Hamas from the Nahal Oz base on October 7, 2023, opens her first speech at Hostages Square: “My name is Karina Ariev, and I am free!”

She says regaining her freedom after 477 days made her “realize I have a role in this world, and that role is to keep fighting until all my hostage brothers and sisters also get their freedom.”

Ariev recounts seeing friends at the Nahal Oz base “fight to the end and pay with their lives” during the Hamas onslaught. For 477 days after that, she was held “in awful conditions, in the dark, in the cold, with the terorists awful treatment of us,” she says.

“I know what it’s like to be in captivity. I know who Hamas is. And as someone who knows both those things, I want to say: The hostages are above all else. First we need to take care of them, and then of everything else,” she says. “Because you can’t put a price on freedom.”

“My rehabilitation can’t start until everyone is here,” she says, calling for a hostage deal.

She thanks hostage rally-goers, troops, and US President Donald Trump for securing her release. She addresses Trump in English.

Ariev and three other female surveillance soldiers were released last month as part of the ceasefire-hostage deal with Hamas. A fifth surveillance soldier was released five days later.

Like other released hostages, the surveillance soldiers have said they learned Arabic in captivity. Speaking at Hostages Square, Ariev addresses remaining captives in Arabic: “Start hoping again, because we’ll get you back.”