The Israeli Hostages Who Forged Connections With Their Captors

Liat Atzili, a 50-year-old history teacher, was held hostage in Gaza for 54 days after being kidnapped by Hamas fighters from her home in Nir Oz, a small kibbutz about one mile away from the Gaza border. “Early on, I said to myself, wow, when again in my lifetime would I have an opportunity to be here? It was like–well, at least let’s take advantage of this affair,” she told an interviewer after she returned to Israel traumatized and determined to act to help release all the hostages left behind.

Atzili was one of several Israeli hostages taken to Gaza on October 7 who, unlike most of the 251 people abducted that day, managed to establish a relationship with their captors. When telling the stories of such relationships, it is important to emphasize from the get-go that these are the exception to the rule. For the most part, according to accounts of many released Israeli hostages, they were held in brutal, harsh conditions, often in underground tunnels; many were starved, physically abused and mentally tortured. Some were killed in captivity, some injured. And all 142 released alive so far bear either physical or emotional scars.

Atzili and several others received better treatment than most and were able and willing to forge a human relationship with their guards, often junior Hamas activists. In such cases, confined in small apartments or in stuffy tunnels, tense and bored, mutually frustrated by the protracted captivity, Israeli civilians and Palestinian fighters got acquainted. They chatted about their families, politics, religion, food and mere survival. Some talked about the day after the war. A few even fantasized about future peace.

“At the end of the day, it’s four people stuck together in an apartment, in a terrible situation,” said Atzili, who spent most of her captivity with another woman from Nir Oz and two Hamas guards. Unlike most other October 7 captives, Atzili and her friend, Ilana Gritzewsky, had a steady supply of food, were allowed to shower regularly and were treated fairly. Their guards were unarmed and apparently were not members of Hamas’s military wing. The circumstances, Atzili told Lee Naim of Israel’s Channel 12 news, “allowed us to put the situation aside and act like human beings inside the four walls that surrounded us.”

The quotes in this story are based on a remarkable series of interviews that Naim conducted with more than a dozen released hostages, featured in her Hebrew podcast Ba-Shevi (In Captivity).

The nature of these relationships forged in captivity was peculiar not only because captor-captive relationships are abnormal. In the past couple of decades, very few Israelis and Gazans have had opportunities to meet one another and simply talk. Decades ago–I still remember the days–Israelis went to eat fish in beachside restaurants in the Gaza Strip while tens of thousands of Gazans used to cross into Israel for work or shopping. But in the past 20 years or so, there has hardly been any contact between Israelis and Gazans.

Then, suddenly, Israelis and Gazans were thrown together, their roles reversed. Gazan Palestinians, who speak of living in an open-air prison, see Israelis as their prison guards. After October 7, for the first time, Israelis–used to either not thinking of Gazans at all or seeing them as a threat that was under control–suddenly found themselves at their mercy. 

Chen Almog-Goldstein, who was captured with three of her children, described a moment that reflected the anomaly. One morning, shortly after she and her kids were snatched to Gaza, their captors prepared them to be moved from one structure to another. To protect the family from being attacked by an angry Gazan mob, Chen and her daughter Agam were ordered to wear traditional long gowns and veils. “We started crying,” she said, “they took away our identity.”

Before being abducted from her kibbutz, Kfar Azza, Almog-Goldstein watched terrorists kill her husband and her eldest daughter, Yam, a soldier on leave, execution style. On her way to Gaza, the mother vowed to never forget the sight of her daughter being shot in the head. In Gaza she met three guards. Two of them ran a small perfume workshop. “One day, they brought a cardboard box with perfume bottles for us to try and smell and tell them what we liked. They showed us how they made it, with alcohol and a syringe,” she said.

The guards seemed eager to connect with their Israeli hostages, Almog-Goldstein said. “Our strong experience was that for many years they have been living there in a pressure cooker. They can’t leave Gaza.” At some point, she said, a guard entwined two of his fingers, and told her, “We will come to live next to you.” She believed they meant it when they suggested some kind of co-existence. “They are preparing for it,” she said. One of them asked her daughter Agam, who was 17 at the time, to teach him Hebrew. She did. “He had a teacher, he had a notebook,” Almog-Goldstein said.

She said she was surprised to witness the humanity of her guards. When Israel’s military pressure surged, the guards, apparently worried they might be killed, wrote letters to their wives. “We sometimes saw their pain. We saw them breaking and crying…they cried because they didn’t know what [had] happened to their families, whether they were hurt” by Israeli bombings, she said, “that’s what broke them.”

A chief task of the Palestinian guards was to protect the hostages from Israeli air bombings. One night, Almog-Goldstein said, she and her children were taken by their guards to seek refuge at a local supermarket. An Israeli air raid blew up a barrage of rocks from the street toward the store “and the terrorists, with their bodies on us…protected us from our own military’s fire.”

The most astonishing relationship story told on the In Captivity podcast is that of Luis Har, a 71-year-old from Kibbutz Urim who was captured together with his life partner, Clara Merman, at her home in a nearby kibbutz, Nir Yitzhak. The couple, together with Klara’s brother Fernando, her sister Gabriela, and Mia, Gabriela’s daughter, ended up at a Palestinian home in southern Gaza. Mia, who was 17 at the time, managed somehow to take her dog Bella with her. The women (and Bella) were released in a swap 53 days later. Luis and Fernando were rescued by an IDF commando unit in February 2024.

Guarding the five was the homeowner, a 41-year-old burly Palestinian father of six, who “clicked with me from the very first moment,” Har told podcaster Naim. “It was Stockholm Syndrome. It’s hard to explain how such a thing happens, but it happened to me. I treated him as my son and he treated me as his father,” said Har. The homeowner was the enemy, Har said, “but on the other hand, we took care of each other.”

At some point, Har said, the Palestinian noticed that his beard had grown wild and asked him if he would like a shave. Har agreed. “He took a simple razor and broke one side. I sat down and with this razor he shaved my entire head and face.” The man’s fingers were enormous, Har said, but he had a gentle touch. And when he was done, “there was not even one scratch. I trusted him,” said Har. When another guard was about to hit Har for standing at an open window, which was strictly prohibited, the homeowner pushed him aside to protect Har. The elderly Israeli explained that he was fascinated by birds nesting at an adjacent building (“it was like a nature film,” he said). and the Palestinian guard, a Hamas activist, joined him at the window in observing the birds.

Har is a skilled cook. The homeowner provided vegetables from his hothouse for Har to cook for everyone, including the guards. Har noticed that the man’s tomatoes were “crazy delicious.” He said, “In Israel, in the kibbutzim, you can’t get this kind of quality.” So, he asked his Palestinian guard-turned-friend if he would give him some tomato seedlings to take with him when the time comes for him to go back home. The man laughed and told Har to just take tomato seeds with him. As he cooked, Har carefully collected the seeds to plant in his backyard, and the Palestinian man promised that one day, when peace comes, he will travel to Har’s kibbutz “to eat pizza with you.” When the IDF commando unit came to get him, Har was rushed and had to leave the little bag with the tomato seeds behind.

Among the various topics that hostages discussed with their guards were sensitive ones such as the Holocaust. Atzili, a history teacher, said that she was once left alone with a young guard who was particularly shy and withdrawn. “He asked me, what is this Holocaust?” Atzili told podcaster Lee Naim. Atzili is a youth guide at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem’s Holocaust Museum. She gave the young man a short lecture. The guard said he did not know about it. “He said, it’s a terrible thing that happened to you. I said, yes, it’s terrible. Do you understand now why we cannot go back to where we came from, as you want us to do?”

At some point, Atzili said, she told her guard, “Look at how we are getting along here. Now, there are 14 million people between the river [Jordan] and the [Mediterranean] sea. None of us is going anywhere. We have no choice but to figure out how to live here–even if not together–how to live here without killing each other.”

Top image: President Joe Biden meets with Liat Atzili, an Israeli-American who was freed in November after being held hostage by Hamas, Monday, July 8, 2024, in the Oval Office (Credit: The White House).