Rescued hostage Almog Meir Jan gives thanks for bond with fellow hostages in Gaza
In TV interview, kidnapped Nova partygoer tells of how he and fellow captives kept each other sane for eight months until their rescue
Rescued hostage Almog Meir Jan has spoken of the emotional and mental support he shared with fellow captives while they were held in the Gaza Strip, including keeping up their spirits by reminding each other daily of the things they were thankful for.
Meir Jan, 21, spent eight months in Hamas captivity, from his abduction from the Nova music festival by the terror group on October 7 to his rescue by Israeli security forces on June 8 from an apartment in central Gaza.
He was held alongside Shlomi Ziv, 41, and Andrey Kozlov, 27, who were also abducted from the Nova festival, Kozlov a partygoer and Ziv a member of the festival’s security team.
Noa Argamani, 26, was held nearby and rescued in the same operation, but they never interacted in captivity.
The three men leaned on each other for support throughout the ordeal, Meir Jan said, having long conversations each day about the minutia of regular life to pass the time.
In a one-hour interview for Channel 12’s Uvda program over the weekend, Meir Jan said he would recount his dreams every morning, noting that he hadn’t managed to dream at all since his return from Gaza.
“Every night I remembered at least three dreams; it was part of my morning routine. I’d wake up and tell Shlomi what I dreamed overnight. For at least an hour, I’d tell him dreams,” Meir Jan said.
He also recalled a practice the men had of naming 10 things they were thankful for each morning, calling that exercise “what really kept me sane.”
He recounted, “At the beginning, it’s easy, ‘Okay, I’m glad I have a family, that I’m healthy.’ And then after 70 days, you find things, like, ‘I’m glad I have socks, I’m glad I have a nail clipper.’”
The rescued hostage recalled his abduction from the Nova festival on October 7, as Hamas terrorists rampaged throughout southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages.
“They stood on either side, and you walked through, and they hit you from here, from there,” Meir Jan said. “From that moment, you’re some kind of a doll.” He recalled someone hitting him with the butt of a gun, and said that terrorists bound his hands and his feet and covered his eyes.
For the first couple of months, he was moved between six houses, he said, until finally being placed in the Nuseirat apartment where he remained until his rescue.
From early on, he was held alongside Ziv and Kozlov— though for the first three days that they were together, he didn’t know what they looked like, he said, as they were all blindfolded, or what they sounded like, as none of them spoke.
For the first two and a half months, Meir Jan said, his hands and legs were cuffed.
The men’s captors, Meir Jan said, all called themselves “Muhammad,” declining to give their real names.
To distinguish between the “Muhammads,” the hostages referred to them among themselves using monikers— “Tall Muhammad,” “Bald Muhammad,” and — for Abdallah Aljamal, the Palestinian journalist in whose home they were held — “Chubby cheeks Muhammad.”
“I gave the good names,” Meir Jan said.
Of all the Hamas guards, Aljamal was the cruelest, Meir Jan said. “He’d be happy, then all of a sudden he’d yell. We were scared to death that it would be a day he was irritable, and the smallest thing that happened, he’d get an idea to punish us.”
Meir Jan recalled some of these punishments: “He’d take a stick, and tie us to the stick, and put a pen in your mouth, and bind your mouth, and we weren’t allowed to talk, weren’t allowed to lean on anything.” This lasted “once for a day, once for two days, once for a week.”
“Usually we were allowed to speak,” Meir Jan recalled, but on one occasion, “me and Shlomi and Andrey were talking about something, and after an hour of talking, [Aljamal said] ‘What, why are you talking? I told you to be quiet! Yalla, go to your mattress, no bathroom, no nothing.’”
“He didn’t like any of us, but Andrey he was more degrading to,” Meir Jan said.
“‘I’m with you, brother,’” Meir Jan recalled telling Kozlov. “Sometimes that’s what you need to hear there. You need someone to tell you, ‘You’re right, you’re okay, you’re not crazy, you’re not dirty, you’re not smelly, you’re okay — but you need to be smart. It’s more important to be smart than to be right.”
That mantra “accompanied us throughout the entire period,” Meir Jan said.
On one occasion, however, Meir Jan failed to restrain himself, and he berated his captor for Hamas’s behavior on October 7, telling him, “You weren’t right, you killed kids.”
“A full week, we weren’t allowed to talk, to move from the bed, even to get up at all,” as punishment for that outburst, he said.
Meir Jan recalled that his guards would threaten to send him into Hamas’s underground tunnel network if he misbehaved.
“They always told us that the conditions there are terrible, that they don’t see the light of day.” He was almost sent into the tunnels at one point, he said.
Meir Jan recalled that “when Ramadan started,” he made himself a calendar, with 80 squares, and began to cross one out each day, deciding that by the 80th day, he would be out of Gaza. The rescue came on Day 76, he said.
The rescued hostage said he had mixed emotions upon his return, which came just hours after his father died. The family learned about his father’s death, Meir Jan’s mother recalled — the two are long separated — when the military tried to notify him that his son had been rescued, and he didn’t pick up.
“Am I supposed to be sad, or am I supposed to be happy?” Meir Jan recalled thinking after the rescue. “All these people come to you every day, and they’re just happy that you’re here. You won’t smile for them? The whole country was waiting for you.
“But you go to bed at the end of the day, and you think about Dad, and about Tomer” — Meir Jan’s close friend, who was killed at the Nova festival — “and it’s really hard.”
Meir Jan said that while he has been mentally stable thus far, “I’m scared of the night I wake up from a dream, and I find myself sweaty, or having wet the bed, and I say, ‘Fuck, it’s started.’”
“For now, it’s with me, not behind me,” Meir Jan said. “There’s everyone that’s there, hostages that remain in Gaza. It hurts. I just think of the cruelty that will happen to them if there’s no deal.”
Asked what message he would send to Benjamin Netanyahu, amid allegations that the prime minister has been sabotaging a deal in order to maintain his coalition, Meir Jan said: “Look me in the eye, tell me if it’s worth it.”
He was also asked how he’d respond to those who argue that Israel should not strike a deal with Hamas until all of its other war aims are achieved.
“If they’d been there, they’d speak differently,” he said.
