By Agam Goldstein-Almog
I was in a dark and damp tunnel deep underground when, in hushed voices, I heard the stories from the young women. Not stories so much as bits and pieces of living nightmares.I was with my mother, my protector, who did everything she could to keep me alive while we were in Hamas’s captivity. Together with my two young brothers, aged nine and eleven, the four of us had been taken from our home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza on the morning of October 7, but not before terrorists shot my father, Nadav, point blank, and afterward went after my older sister, Yam, the bullet tearing through her face.
Their blood spattered everywhere. We stepped over my father’s dying body as the terrorists screamed at us, took us out of our home, and drove us into Gaza.
I never got to say goodbye. Any hopes we had that they were still alive were dashed when we heard over the radio that they had been murdered at some point during our captivity.
We were moved a lot during our time in confinement, transferred through a series of homes, apartments, tunnels, and even a mosque in Gaza. Our captors were cruel. During our captivity, they told us they “would be back” to our kibbutz. The fear was paralyzing. It overtook me. I remember saying to my mom when we entered the city, “They’re going to torture me. They’re going to rape me.”
It was in the tunnels that I met other young women. Most of them were just a year or so older than my 17 years. Some still had bloody gunshot wounds that had been left untreated in makeshift bandages. One had a dismembered limb.
I heard from them accounts of terrifying and grotesque sexual abuse, often at gunpoint. They told me that when they were sad and cried, their captors took advantage of their helplessness even more, stroking and caressing them, and then shoving and grabbing intimate parts of their bodies.
They were treated like playthings.
My mother, Chen, hugged them. They told us they hadn’t heard the word Ima (Mom) in so long. They ached for their mothers. My mom later told me that she felt like they all were her daughters, having just lost one of her daughters herself.
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Kibbutz Kfar Aza: 2024-01-28 Three more female Zionist ‘soldiers’ confirmed captured by Palestinian forces
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Kibbutz Kfar Aza: 2023-12-23 Miracle in Hell: The Baby Twins Who Survived a Massacre