‘Who deserves to leave?’: Eitan Horn describes moment Hamas released his brother but not him

Eitan Horn, one of the final 20 living hostages to be released in October 2025, describes his experience during 738 days in Hamas captivity, including the moment his brother Iair was released while he remained in Gaza, in a Hebrew-language interview with Channel 12.

Eitan and Iair were kidnapped during the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, onslaught, leaving behind a third brother, Amos. Iair was freed in February 2025, as part of a previous ceasefire.

Eitan tells the Hebrew network that for the first two weeks of captivity, the brothers were held separately. They knew nothing about each other’s fate until they ran into one another by chance.

“I saw him from afar. We looked at each other and very quickly understood that we weren’t allowed to say we were brothers,” Eitan says, explaining that they feared their relation could be used against them by their captors.

“We didn’t open our mouths. We just continued. He saw me, he calmed down, and that gave us strength to keep going,” he says.

After many of the women and children in captivity were released in a November 2023 ceasefire, the brothers were reunited, becoming the only pair of brothers to be held hostage together for a long period.

Eitan says that their terrorist captors used their relationship to psychologically torture them.

“It was a card for them — to continue the mental abuse all the time. To humiliate us, [saying things like], shall we leave me there and let Iair go? Or execute him and not me?”

Ahead of Iair’s release, a Hamas commander entered their tunnel and told them that two hostages from their group of about four would be released under the ceasefire deal, tauntingly asking them, “Who do you think deserves to leave?”

Eitan adds, “None of us named ourselves among the two who should leave. Then, after a week, comes the happiest moment in these two years — they announce that Iair is going home. That he’s saved.”

But he says, “I know that Iair’s real nightmare was beginning. He’s leaving me there, he knows very well how he’s leaving me and in whose hands he’s leaving me, and what he’d have to go through to fight so that his little brother wouldn’t have to die there, inside.”

Iair says the day he was freed and left Eitan in captivity was his “worst day over the 738 days.”

Eitan also describes enduring humiliation to convince the terrorists to provide the hostages with more food, which was dangerously scarce. Eitan says he “let [the terrorists] laugh at me for being smelly, for being stupid, dancing for them. But if afterward we got two more dates [to eat] — then I did my part.”

He adds, “I did the Hamas diet and lost 64 kilos” (141 pounds), saying that “over two years I didn’t really move my body.”

On one occasion, they forced the brothers and fellow hostages to walk for 12 hours through tunnel networks. “I was in tunnels for two years without sun, without air, without night or day, without smells, without hearing birds,” Eitan says. “To be there for two years like we were, with everything we went through — no one will ever understand that.”