Rescued hostage recounts abuse by Hamas captors, emotional reunion with family
Andrey Kozlov describes June 8 as a ‘birthday’ after daring op in which he and other Israelis were rescued, says he was afraid his family wouldn’t again hear him say ‘I love you’
Andrey Kozlov, who was rescued from Hamas captivity last month, said in a series of interviews released Friday that he was convinced his captors would murder him and film the killing.
But when he was first abducted to Gaza from the Supernova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im, Kozlov — a recent Russian émigré — thought his kidnappers were rescuing him, he told the Ynet news site.
Kozlov, 27, was rescued on June 8 along with 21-year-old Almog Meir Jan and 40-year-old Shlomi Ziv by Israeli special forces who raided the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip. All three were seized on October 7 along with dozens of others at the Nova outdoor music festival, where terrorists massacred over 360 people.
Also rescued in the operation was Noa Argamani, 26, another of the Nova hostages, who was held some 180 meters (200 yards) away.
Arnon Zmora, 36, of the elite Yamam counterterrorism unit, was killed in the operation. Kozlov told the Ynet news that he and his relatives went to console Zmora’s family.
“Everyone always says to me, ‘you’re such a hero,’ ‘you’re so brave,’ and I want to say to them: No, Arnon Zmora is a hero. Our soldiers our heroes. Not me,” Kozlov said.
Kozlov and Ziv were both working as security guards at the Nova festival and were kidnapped together in the latter’s own car. In Gaza, they were moved several times before being transferred in December to Nuseirat, in the Strip’s center. It was from there that they were rescued.
He told CNN that at first, he was afraid of being killed in an Israeli airstrike.
“For the first three months, we were afraid of every bomb that we heard. Every time we started to hide in the corner of our rooms,” he said, adding that their captors laughed at them for being afraid.
Kozlov told Ynet that the captors, who all presented themselves as Muhammad, abused the hostages physically and emotionally. The hostages used a slang term to refer to one of them due to his large cheeks, who the news site identified as Abdallah Aljamal, a Palestine Chronicle correspondent in whose home the three were held.
Aljamal, Kozlov surmised, had a split personality disorder; he would sometimes play cards with the hostages, and animatedly discuss with them the Israel-Palestinian conflict. At one point, according to Kozlov, Aljamal turned to him and said, “I love you.”
At other times, however, Kozlov recalled how Aljamal would strike them, lock them up in the bathroom and bury them under suffocating blankets in the hot Gaza weather.
The treatment of the hostages gradually improved, though Kozlov said the punishments never ceased.
The abductors would also play mind games on the hostages. They told Ziv, for example, that his wife had given up on him and moved on, Kozlov said.
“I tried not to believe in it. I was sure that my family was looking for me. I was sure that the wife of Shlomi was [still] trying to find him. I was sure that Israel doesn’t want to kill us. But they told us this a lot,” he said.
The hostages were repeatedly told that Israel wanted to kill them, because the price of a living hostage was higher than that of a dead one. In fact, Kozlov told Channel 12, when the Israeli troops came to rescue them, he was unsure at first if they had come to kill them.
That morning, he told CNN, he had been reading a book about Marco Polo. He said his abductors had given the hostages four or five books to read, including the Quran.
When asked by CNN whether he had seen other hostages in captivity, Kozlov declined to elaborate, saying he was concerned for the safety of those still in Gaza. He did say, however, that those he did see were in worse condition than he was.
Kozlov told CNN that he watched the video of his rescue repeatedly.
“It’s special for me,” he said. “It’s my third birthday,” he continued, explaining that he saw October 7 as one birthday and June 8 — the day of his rescue — as another. He showed a tattoo on his arm that traces wounds he sustained the day he was kidnapped.
Kozlov, speaking in English, was animated in the interviews, often miming and voicing explosions. But his voice dropped to a whisper when he described the moment when he was first reunited with his mother in Israel.
In a now-iconic video, Kozlov could be seen falling to his knees, crying and hugging his mother’s legs as she consoled him. CNN asked Kozlov if he was aware how difficult his eight months in captivity were for his parents.
“I was so afraid not to see them,” Kozlov said. “I imagined how my mother and father and brother will not hear the words ‘I love you’ anymore.”
In addition to Kozlov and the three other Israelis extracted from Gaza on June 8, three other hostages taken during the Hamas-led October 7 atrocities have been rescued alive, and the bodies of 19 hostages have also been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the military.
It is believed that 116 of the 251 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza — not all of them alive — after 105 civilians were released from Hamas captivity during a weeklong truce in late November, and four hostages were released prior to that..
