Freed hostage reveals glee Hamas took in murder, starvation, cruelty

Eliya Cohen, 27, released from captivity in Gaza five-and-a-half weeks ago, revealed to Hebrew media on Tuesday some of the torments he endured at the hands of Hamas.

Currently undergoing treatment for a gunshot wound to the leg and damaged hearing, he told Israel’s Channel 12 News he hasn’t forgotten the friends he lost or those he left behind.

Cohen, who spent 505 days in captivity, was released on Feb. 22 along with five other hostages, in exchange for imprisoned terrorists held by Israel.

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Alon Ohel, a close friend he made in captivity, remained behind. “I promised him, to Alon, that this isn’t over until you and I meet in Israel. That’s why I’m here, too,” Cohen said, explaining one reason he had agreed to the interview.

Cohen, together with his fiance, Ziv Aboud, were partying at the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im on Oct. 7, 2023.

“We arrived at 4:00 a.m. and the whole place was crowded with friends. We’re drunk, having the most fun in the world—laughing and hugging everyone. At around 6:00 a.m., we heard the first interception,” Cohen recalled, referring to the massive rocket barrage Hamas launched in tandem with its ground invasion.

He and his fiancée were among the first to leave the festival and arrive at a roadside bomb shelter. The small concrete shelter quickly filled up with people. Slowly, they began to realize the magnitude of the attack. It was in the shelter that Cohen first met Alon Ohel.

“We received alerts on the phone about terrorist infiltration, and suddenly a guy showed up and said he had been shot in a car. We understood that it was much more than the missiles, but we had complete faith that the army was going to arrive,” said Cohen.

At one point, hearing gunfire, he told Ziv, his fiancée, that they should run for it. She said they were better off staying hidden.

Pickup trucks stopped at the entrance to the shelter. They heard shouting in Arabic. “They threw the first grenade. Someone screams: ‘Grenade!’ I jumped on Ziv, literally prostrated myself, and the first thing that escapes my mouth is: ‘Ziv, I love you.’ The grenade exploded, killing everyone at the entrance. Ziv replied: ‘Eliya, I love you.’”

One of the Israelis in the shelter, off-duty Staff Sgt. Aner Shapira, stood up and said, “We can’t let them kill us like this,” Cohen recalled. When another grenade came in, he took it and threw it back at the terrorists. Everyone applauded and encouraged him, said Cohen. “I said to myself: ‘How do they function at all? I’m going to lose my sanity in a second.’”

Aner, grenade in hand, was shot by the terrorists and collapsed. Others continued to throw grenades out, said Cohen. “I remember a girl picking up a grenade and throwing it out,” he added.

Then Hersh Goldberg-Polin picked up a grenade.

“And there was the last grenade, that ended up cutting off Hersh’s hand. “After that, no one got up to throw grenades anymore,” said Cohen.

(Goldberg-Polin, 23, who became one of the most recognizable faces among the hostages, was abducted and later killed by his captors.)

At that point, they went into survival mode, said Cohen.

“I see a corpse and just grab it, covering myself. I say to myself: ‘At least if grenades explode, it will protect me and Ziv.’ During the whole event, she keeps making sure to show me that she’s alive. We hold hands and she keeps making sure to give me little [nudges] in the back, saying to me, ‘Eliya are you okay? I’m alive.’”

Then Ziv said something Cohen said stayed with him through 505 days of captivity: “Well, at least up there we will be together. There, no one will be able to disturb us.”

It was at this point that he was shot in the leg. Cohen lost consciousness and remembers nothing until 11:00 a.m. When he woke, he recited the Shema, a prayer Jews traditionally said before death. He opened his eyes and saw three terrorists.

“They had phones and a flash drive, and were taking pictures of us,” he said. One had a “crazy smile.”

“I will never in the world forget that smile. I’m going to sleep with that smile. I live with it. That’s the smile of my kidnapping,” he said.

Cohen realized he was on his way to Gaza. The terrorists were “happy, raging and jubilant, as if they had won. They beat us … stepped on us and spit on us.”

One of the captives decided to make a run for it. The others warned against it. He jumped from the van. They stopped and shot him, said Cohen, before continuing “as if nothing happened.”

In Gaza, he was permitted to shower. He saw himself in a mirror. He was covered in blood, with burned skin on his face and body. He remembered struggling to believe that he was covered in parts of other people.

Someone came to operate on his gunshot wound. He was given no anesthesia. The surgeon told him to bite on a cloth, warning him not to shout. “If the civilians outside hear you, they will enter the house and I have no way to protect you,” he told Cohen.

He was initially held in an apartment together with Alon. After 52 days, they were taken to a tunnel, where for the first time they saw more captives.

In the tunnels, they were chained so tightly it cut off circulation to their legs, said Cohen, adding that it took them 10 minutes just to walk to the bathroom in the shackles.

The chains were on their legs for months. Only for showers, taken once every two months, were they removed. It was hard to sleep due to the discomfort of the chains, deliberately tightened, he said.

However, the hardest part, he added, was the hunger. “In the end, you can handle everything. You can deal with being humiliated. You can deal with being cursed. You can deal with the chains on your feet. Hunger is a daily struggle because beyond being hungry, you are also fighting for your life. You go to bed every night with: ‘What am I going to do tomorrow to get that piece of pita,’” Cohen told Channel 12.

They were given a dry pita and two tablespoons of beans or peas daily. The terrorists would play games with them, he said. He “would beg God” to receive that dry pita and two tablespoons of beans, he recalled.

“You find yourself begging. And they enjoy it,” he said. “They know they’re starving you.”

If a terrorist was alone, the captives would try appealing to him. Many times it worked, he said. “I can’t describe this feeling to you when you suddenly manage to touch his heart and he quietly comes into the room and brings you some pita bread or some chocolate bar or some peanut butter bar. It’s the best thing that ever happened to you in your life at that moment because you survived another day,” he said.

The humiliation and psychological abuse was constant, said Cohen. “They would come into our room once or twice a week, and say, ‘Come on, everyone take off their clothes and underwear.’” They were checking to see if their prisoners were sufficiently thin, he said, adding, “They’d have a discussion about it.”

They would be smiling during these conversations, he said.

“You look at them and you see the smile on their faces,” he said. “There is nothing more Nazi than that. I hate the comparisons about the Holocaust, but that’s the best name there is for it.”

The entire time he didn’t believe that Ziv was alive. “In no scenario in the world did I imagine that she would survive it. At first it was very difficult for me, the realization that I had lost my partner.”

But on the outside, Ziv had been fighting to bring about his release.

Then, one day a Hamas officer came in and told the guards to remove the chains. They were taken out of the tunnel, which exited into a schoolteacher’s room.

“The first thing we see is a crazy apocalypse. There is not a single building standing in Gaza. There is a deafening silence. Only IDF leaflets are scattered everywhere [with instructions] to leave the place. And bodies are everywhere. A shocking smell of death,” said Cohen.

They were put in a dark room where the only illumination was from a flashlight. There was no toilet or beds. They realized that their conditions had actually been better in the tunnel, he said.

When the Jan. 19 ceasefire deal came about, the terrorists were joyful, he recalled. “More food started arriving. “

When Eli Sharabi, 52, Or Levy, 34, and Ohad Ben Ami, 56, were released, their emaciated condition led to an international uproar. This caused the terrorists to bring the prisoners still more food.

Then came word that Cohen was to be released, but not Alon.

“Alon panicked. He was very frightened and he started crying. I looked at him and said, ‘Dude, I’m leaving on March 1 and you’re on March 8? It’s all good.’ I really, really believed that the second stage would come so quickly,” said Cohen.

“We hug and cry, I tell him to be strong. I promise him that just because I’m going upstairs doesn’t mean I’m forgetting him,” he said.

“A week before my departure we sat down. It was a Monday, after which Alon had a birthday. And Alon cries there and tells [a terrorist]: ‘I have a birthday next week, let me out.’ On this level, his innocence is magical. And the terrorist looks at him and he doesn’t know how to react to the situation,” said Cohen.

Cohen described his return as “the happiest moment of my life. I look everyone there in the eye, and I give them a ‘V’ of victory.”

One of the first places Cohen visited was the cemetery, to pay respects to friends he lost, including his nephew Amit Ben Avida and Avida’s girlfriend, Karin Schwartzman, who were murdered in the shelter along with 14 others. PJC