GNITN – Special Edition

Israel At War – Day 78

There Are Bad People

Detailed Hostage Interview

Getting updates on military activity is a good thing, but I also think we need to get the human side of things from time to time. And today we got a very detailed account of two hostages who were released after 51 days of captivity. A mother and her daughter sat down with The Times Of Israel to provide us with the most personal information of any of the released hostages so far:

A mother and daughter freed from Hamas captivity have described their complex, terrifying 51 days in the hands of Gaza terrorists, which included threats and mind games but also efforts to keep them “happy,” as well as harrowing brushes with Israeli air strikes in the Palestinian enclave.

Chen Goldstein-Almog, 48, and her 17-year-old daughter Agam Goldstein-Almog were taken hostage on October 7 during Hamas’s shock onslaught, along with young boys Gal, 11, and Tal, 9. Father Nadav and second daughter Yam were murdered by the terrorists at the family’s home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza. The four — mother, daughter and two boys — were released from Gaza in late November under a temporary truce deal.

Speaking to Channel 12 news Friday, some three weeks after they were freed, Chen and Agam said they did what they could to survive and “stay sane,” and developed a sometimes tense and combative but largely civil rapport with their captors under terrifying circumstances. Their account of their lives in captivity is one of the most detailed and nuanced yet provided.

They were in their safe room when the terrorists came into their home. Agam said this in the moment:

“I was very afraid, and then when they came,” Agam said, “when they stood outside the door and shouted at us, I had some kind of stress release like, ‘That’s it, I’m going to die.’ And I accepted that.”

Part of Chen’s coping skills was to remember what happened then:

Nadav tried to defend the family with a wooden plank and was “shot in the chest at point-blank range,” said Chen. Yam was “shot in the face,” she said, adding that it was very difficult to process at that moment what she was seeing. Chen said that every day in Gaza, she forced herself to “never forget what I saw,” even in “the most difficult, and scary, and dark moments.”

I can’t even comprehend how they survived the mental trauma of seeing loved ones killed in front of them.

Fear Was Of Being Assaulted

Agam was afraid she would be like other females taken captive:

Agam said she feared being raped or sexually abused, as other female hostages and victims are now known to have been, and that their captors taunted the 17-year-old that she would be “married off” to someone in Gaza and that they would “find [her] a husband.”

Rape, she said, was “the first thing I was afraid of” on the petrifying drive into Gaza. “I told my mother: ‘They are going to rape me.’ I asked the driver: ‘Just together, keep us together.’ And we indeed stayed together, surprisingly,'” she told Channel 12.

They were moved many times, staying in a tunnel for a week and then moved to an apartment. They were guarded 24/7 and even moved in the middle of the night where they wore a hijab. They slept with it on because it was required to be worn during the moves. When the IDF started the bombing they said they needed to move:

“There was intense bombing and my whole body started shaking and I said to the terrorist: ‘We need to move from here,'” she said.

“It’s crazy booms, they’re physical,” said Chen. “It’s panic, it’s dread, it’s something physical that would take us a while to calm down from. It’s something we couldn’t control, and we live in the Gaza periphery, we know what it’s like.”

Attitudes Changed

Throughout their captivity, especially when the guards appeared to be nice to them, they believed that their captors were good people at heart that were just doing bad things:

While describing scenes of friendly interaction, Agam stressed that “I don’t want anyone to think we had it good there, that they’re good there, that we saw humanity there. We’re telling these stories, about the things that were slightly normal in an abnormal situation, because that’s what kept us just a bit sane.”

Agam described one incident in which the family was staying at a school where “a nice woman welcomed us and offered us water and arranged a place for us to sleep,” and “I turned to my mother and said ‘There are good people in the world.'”

“And five minutes later, they shot a barrage of rockets from the school [into Israel] and everyone was shouting ‘Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar’ and I told her, ‘Forget what I said, they’re all the same.'”

She added that before the attack, “We believed that there are no bad people — only people who have it bad. But there are bad people.”

At some point forgiving Hamas for what they did to her family would seem to be a goal, but Agam isn’t there yet and even has a message for those who think peace is possible:

“We will never forgive and we will never show any kind of empathy towards these people,” Agam said. “If we previously believed that there was a chance for peace, we’ve lost all faith in these people, especially after we were there and among the population.”

They Knew Their True Value

When the family stayed in a supermarket, the IDF attacked the area. Here is how Chen recalled that time:

“We had a fear that they would get instructions to kill us,” Chen recounted. “We’d ask them sometimes. They’d say, ‘We’ll die before you do, we’ll die together.’ Very reassuring right?”

Another time, the family was staying somewhere behind a supermarket and Israeli strikes hit nearby. The family tried to use their mattresses as some form of cover “and then our guards, our captors, the terrorists, were on top of us, protecting us with their bodies from the strikes,” Chen said, but she had no illusions as to why. “We were very valuable to them,” she said.

Chen also was able to help young women who were alone as we read in these quotes:

In the last week of their captivity in Gaza before their release, they were again taken into tunnels, where they met other hostages.

“There were girls there who were alone, alone for 50 days, 19-year-olds, alone, who went through difficult things, personally. They were violated, harmed, some were injured,” Chen said.

Men also suffered abuse and torture, they said.

“Something that was very emotional for me, these young amazing girls, they told me they heard the kids calling me ‘mom,'” Chen said, tearing up. “Because the kids kept calling me ‘mom,’ and the girls there suddenly said, ‘We’re hearing the word mom. We haven’t heard that all our time in captivity.’ I hugged them. Some are close in age to Yam, my daughter. I tried to hug them like a mother.”

Being considered pawns in the war was one thing, offering comfort to others was their real value then. Chen also tried to leave those not released with some hope, though:

Chen said she promised young female hostages who were not being freed that she would speak to their mothers and let them know they were alive.

A Harrowing Time Of Transfer

I reported about this in previous videos, but this is a personal account of how getting out of Gaza was no walk in the park:

Handed over to the Red Cross, the family experienced one of the most frightening incidents, as angry Palestinian civilians crowded around the cars, with some hurling rocks and jumping at the vehicles.

“I told my mom, we didn’t die so far, but we’re going to die now,” Agam said. The Red Cross staff shouted at people outside to steer clear but “were without weapons, and we had been guarded with weapons for 51 days.”

It was like night and day actually getting into Israel:

Crossing over into Israel was “like magic,” Chen said. “We got to some place, and suddenly the soothing voices, the kind eyes. It was a very, very moving moment.”

Describing scenes of joyful Israelis meeting them upon their return, Agam said she “didn’t stop crying” and was sorry her captive friends couldn’t see it.

She described their state as “a very sad happiness,” with the family not whole, and many hostages left behind.

Both Chen and Agam made their cases for all the hostages to come home as they did.

Healing Is Going To Take Some Time

As one would expect, closure and healing are not going to happen anytime soon. Both Chen and Agam echoed this in these quotes:

The family, living temporarily in Tel Aviv, has been trying to come to terms with life without a father and a sister, Chen said.

“We were a happy home, a home with laughter,” she added. “It will always be a part of us. The abysses of pain are very, very deep.”

“We didn’t have the closure that every human being who buries someone has,” Agam said, as Nadav and Yam were buried without them present. “We didn’t have a funeral, and not a shiva… To be honest, I thought it would be easier [to be freed], but it’s just worse than I thought.”

Agam said she’s not sure “what to work on first. The trauma of captivity? The loss? The pain?”
Laughter is good medicine, and so is gratitude:

At the same time, she’s told her mother they should be thankful for every day of life. “Any day we’ve woken up in the morning, that’s enough,” she said. “We should be joyful.”

Then, she said, she hears her father’s voice in her head, mocking her playfully to “stop with the platitudes.”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, when praying for the peace of Jerusalem, pray specifically for this family as they try to heal from a tragic time of hurt and loss. And pray for the hostages still yet to leave.