‘They did it all so easily’: Ex-hostages recount chilling details of Oct. 7, captivity
Chen Goldstein-Almog tells of her daughter’s murder after terrorists found her IDF uniform at their Kfar Aza home; freed hostages speak of continuous fear of sexual assault in Gaza
Jessica Steinberg, The Times of Israel's culture and lifestyles editor, covers the Sabra scene from south to north and back to the center
Hamas terrorists swarmed through Chen Goldstein-Almog’s home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza on October 7, shooting and killing her husband and her 20-year-old daughter before bundling her and her three surviving children into her car and driving them into Gaza.
Goldstein-Almog and two other released hostages spoke in person at a screening of testimonials prepared by the Government Press Office and screened in the GPO’s offices in Jerusalem on Monday for press and diplomats.
She described seeing terrorists swarm through their house, yelling “Jews, Jews” in Arabic.
Goldstein-Almog’s husband, Nadav, tried to protect the family and was quickly shot in the chest, his family forced to walk around his dead body to follow the terrorists out of their safe room.
Minutes later, they fatally shot her eldest, Yam, in the face when they found her IDF uniform in another room.
“It all took place between 11:25 a.m. and 11:52 a.m.,” said Chen Goldstein-Almog, weeping as she recalled the moment when she saw that her daughter, Yam, was taking her last breaths, blood gurgling through her wound.
“They did it all so easily and quietly,” said Goldstein-Almog. “By 11:52 there’s a picture of my car going to Gaza. Seven minutes later, we’re in Gaza.”
Once in Gaza, where Goldstein-Almog and her three children remained captive for the next 51 days, it became clear from conversations with their guards that Hamas had been preparing their October 7 onslaught for years, she said.
“They have plans to come again,” she said. “They told us not to go back to Kfar Aza, to go to Tel Aviv, to Acre. “They said it was 3,000 terrorists last time and next time it will be 20,000. ‘It will take us a few years to recover and we’ll be back.’ They have nothing to lose.”
Sitting next to Goldstein-Almog, released hostage Meirav Tal described being briefly reunited in Gaza with her partner’s 13-year-old son, Yagil Yaakov, who had also been taken hostage.
The boy shrieked when he first saw Tal in a Gaza hospital clinic, and the two spent hours “staring at each other like we were in a dream,” she said. The two of them were later released, separately, in the November hostage deal.
And Luis Har, who was rescued from Gaza with his partner’s brother, Fernando Marman, by IDF forces on February 12, described being taken out through a small kitchen window by commandos and closing the window behind them, so it wouldn’t be immediately noticeable that they had left.
The GPO footage screened on Monday included testimonies given by released hostages and survivors of the October 7 attack on the Gaza border communities, interspersed with video footage of Hamas terrorists as they attacked on that day.
In the film, now-released hostage Doron Katz-Asher spoke about being shot while being taken on a tractor to Gaza, and realizing that her mother, Efrat Katz, had been shot and killed in front of her eyes.
Keren Munder described the fever, nightmares and lice that people suffered from in the tunnels, while her son, Ohad, 9, described being constantly surrounded by terrorists with weapons. Both were released from captivity at the end of November.
It was evident how difficult it was for the released hostages to recall their traumas aloud, sitting onstage at the GPO gathering.
Tal, whose partner, Yair Yaakov, was at first presumed taken captive from their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz and was later discovered in February to have been killed on October 7, described being taken captive with Ada Sagi, 75, also from Kibbutz Nir Oz. Once in Gaza, the two women were instructed to strip naked so they could be searched for an IDF chip their captors assumed they would find implanted in their bodies.
Tal insisted, shaking with fear, on being checked by a woman, an argument that she eventually won. The two were then dressed in traditional Palestinian clothing and photographed with a parade of people who kept coming into the apartment.
Fearing sexual assault, Tal, 53, kept telling her captors that she was an old lady.
“In normal life, you want to be young but in life there, I had no problem being even 100 years old,” she said. “There was a lot of fear in those 45 days.”
All of the released hostages spoke about the overt sexual threats made by their captors.
Har was kept hostage with his partner, Clara, and her siblings and niece, Mia Leimberg. Har said they were fearful about Mia, 17, as one of their captors kept making motions about placing a wedding ring on her finger. Eventually, they told Mia to pretend she was sleeping under the blanket whenever he was in the room.
Without mentioning names, Goldstein-Almog described emotional meetings with other hostages throughout their captivity, including an older couple from Kfar Aza and a young man, and several female soldiers, including two who had started serving in a surveillance unit on the border just days prior to October 7.
“Every meeting with hostages is emotional,” said Goldstein-Almog. “Every one tells their difficult abduction story.”
Most difficult is the situation of those who have not been freed. Goldstein-Almog described younger women trying to tend to their injuries while in the tunnels, removing shrapnel from their limbs, and sometimes forced to perform sexual acts on their captors.
“And they’re still there, they’re still there,” she said, shaking her head. “I thought they’d come out after us. I hope they’re still together.”
Orit Sulitzeanu, who directs the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel, has been helping spearhead the effort to take testimonies of sexual abuse in Gaza.
It’s a complicated matter to receive rape testimonies from survivors as “they don’t want to talk about it,” said Sulitzeanu, speaking at the GPO screening. “They want to deal with it privately.”
There is evidence, she said, but there’s no DNA, as no rape kits were used at the time because it was a war scene.
“So now Israel is in the family of nations who have women who were used as weapons of war,” said Sulitzeanu, “and the stories will come out gradually.”
Everybody responsible for the disasters of October 7 will have to pay, but only after the war, said Tal. For now, she said, it’s impossible to return to any kind of normal life.
“So routine is not routine,” she said. “There’s a lot of flashbacks, nightmares, bad dreams. We go to therapy, to psychiatrists, and our lives have completely changed.”
