Oct. 7, 2025 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
52:55
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Didn't quite make sense. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, are you ready to start? | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right, we're good. | |
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| We are starting. | ||
| Welcome to our fight. | ||
| So, my name is Juan Selena and I'm 41 years old currently and I was kidnapped from the Nova Festival. | ||
| Being held captive for 54 days, which I, you know, these days I'm not saying the amount of days because I feel like awkward to say 54 compared to 603 days, which is unacceptable in no way, but on October 7th, which is what I live till today, for us, it's not a year and a half passed by. | ||
| It's the same day every single day till everybody will come back. | ||
| I was at Inova, I came as a vendor and basically came first time to a festival, first time showing my jewelry in that, you know, size and amount. | ||
| I was working on it for day and night for three weeks, thinking that this is, you know, this is going to be the great opening and this is me starting my new journey, you know. | ||
| And the entire night was bad hunches that I couldn't explain. | ||
| Bad hunches that I couldn't explain. | ||
| There was a video that was posted a few months ago that shows some of the footage of us that night and I saw my body language. | ||
| I was so like, you know, close body language. | ||
| I was not dancing. | ||
| I was on the side. | ||
| I could not explain what I was going through, you know. | ||
| And then at 6.29, everything shattered. | ||
| Two rockets in the sky and like many testimonies that I'm sure you heard, there was non-stop bombing, rockets, grenades, RPGs. | ||
| Everything that you can think of was on there at that time. | ||
| How quickly from the rockets they shot the rockets first, I assume, and then broke through. | ||
| So was it just like explosions everywhere? | ||
| The rockets was supposed to be confusing us, to not know that at the same time they shot us two rockets, they entered Israel in some points and then just waited for everything to become a chaos. | ||
| They were not expected that everything will be open and they will come and they were not expected the amount of people that were at the Nova Festival. | ||
| So it felt that they were celebrating their big own festival, you know. | ||
| And for us, for me especially, it was, I was at the Nova Festival till 5 at 8, 5 to 8 in the morning, which means that at that point we are completely surrounded, not knowing, rejecting everything that I see. | ||
| I served the army 22 years ago. | ||
| I know what I hear. | ||
| I know what I feel, and I keep resisting it. | ||
| That cannot be happening, you know. | ||
| And we didn't run at the beginning. | ||
| And at that point, we didn't know that there were terrorists on the other side of the festival. | ||
| And one of my friends, he tried to protect me as long as he could. | ||
| And he gave me that cue that I was so afraid to hear. | ||
| And he said, start to run as fast as possible. | ||
| And like I say in my lectures, you know, nobody taught us how to be that hopeless. | ||
| And nobody taught us how to maneuver or drive in a car between screaming people. | ||
| And every time I say it was completely chaos because when a person having an anxiety attack, then the best tool for him is to look up for another reaction. | ||
| And I saw some people laughing and I saw some people dancing and I saw some people running and screaming and it's like we didn't understood what is going on. | ||
| You know, that's completely chaos. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| That was me starting to run. | ||
| How long between the initial sounds that you heard did you see actual terrorists coming through? | ||
| So that's where I felt protected. | ||
| I didn't see in my eyes the terrorists and the dead bodies, but the car that I was in with my friends running away, we were shot at the car. | ||
| We see bullet holes on the car. | ||
| They saw bodies, they saw the terrorists right behind us. | ||
| We were trying to escape them for five hours. | ||
| So it was like completely put in an effort for trying to save my life, you know, not fighting them back at any point. | ||
| And at one point we were completely lost. | ||
| You know, we didn't know where to go because at any turn we took we were shot at. | ||
| And we managed to grab the police over the phone and they gave us a command to get off the cars and go hide in the trees. | ||
| You know, at that day, there were 45,000 calls to the police, which came to so many places in the country because they didn't have the amount of people to help us. | ||
| So they didn't understand the situation and the place that we were at. | ||
| There was no place to hide. | ||
| And they gave us the command to get off the card, you know. | ||
| And we were trying to hide. | ||
| We were five people. | ||
| So you did get out of the car. | ||
| We got off the cars. | ||
| We didn't know what to do. | ||
| Every second you feel that this is gonna be over, right? | ||
| It's gonna be over soon. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| It's keeping on, keeping on, keeping on. | ||
| And the amount of anxiety that I felt at that point almost exploded my brain, you know. | ||
| I almost fell asleep because I couldn't handle the situation. | ||
| I was so terrified that it was, okay, maybe I will fall asleep and it will be over. | ||
| You know, it's a bad dream or something. | ||
| And we were cleaning on each other. | ||
| I don't know how to explain it, but oh, this is one special person. | ||
| If he wants to speak, this is Michelle. | ||
| This is the guy. | ||
| Dave, nice to meet you. | ||
| This is Guy's father. | ||
| And Dai was taken hostage and was murdered in Gaza. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And he's still in captivity. | |
| Still in captivity. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Already 603 days. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a shame. | ||
| And still counting, unfortunately. | ||
| God bless you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bye. | |
| You know, when I see them, then my body started to shiver because when I'm telling their story, it's like I feel plain that I got back home, you know. | ||
| And it's not passing by us at no point of time, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So at that point, we were like cleaning on each other, thinking that, you know, the person sitting next to me, he must know what to do at that situation. | ||
| But, you know, I saw all the hairs, like goosebumps. | ||
| And the guy that I was like counting on, he's scared. | ||
| He's trying to protect his girlfriend. | ||
| And I understand that I'm by myself, you know. | ||
| And I called my dad. | ||
| I was trying to put myself like really calm and telling him that this is not a joke. | ||
| We are being shot at. | ||
| We need to get off and go hide in the trees. | ||
| But everything is okay. | ||
| And that's the last word he heard from me because he couldn't understand. | ||
| He thought that I'm being overdramatic, you know. | ||
| And my mom called and I didn't want to answer because she's more okay and I'm afraid of her, you know. | ||
| But she called and I texted her, I don't have a battery, I love you. | ||
| And it's like I deleted that, I love you, because I'm not, I don't want to say goodbye, you know, I'm not saying goodbye from nobody. | ||
| And really trusting that this thing will end. | ||
| But then 40 minutes later, it's not only artillery sound anymore. | ||
| We hear him screaming in Arabic and they're coming towards us. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's the point that you need to run as fast as possible. | ||
| And I didn't see my friends anymore at one point. | ||
| And the terrorist was right behind me holding an iron pipe, like about to beat me up in my head. | ||
| And I didn't have any other point. | ||
| I had to jump from a high place. | ||
| And I jumped and I hit my leg. | ||
| And he jumped after me, was about to beat me up. | ||
| And I could never explain the person, no matter how much I tell this situation, what I felt inside. | ||
| Like something was controlling me at that point and reacting for me because I couldn't, you know, and I pretended to be an Arab. | ||
| That's what came out from my mouth. | ||
| I had an Arabic necklace on my neck, which I got as a present from my jewelry suppliers. | ||
| I'm a jewelry designer. | ||
| And I was trying to protect my life by pretending to be an Arab and saying, my name is Stella, my name is Stella. | ||
| And at one point, he took the iron pipe down and he said, okay, enough. | ||
| But then he took things from my pockets and he told me to go on the mountain. | ||
| And I didn't realize I had two broken legs at that point. | ||
| And it's like you don't feel the pain. | ||
| It's mine over a body at fight or flight. | ||
| It's mine if it's not mine that you are not surviving this situation. | ||
| And I climbed the mountain and he asked me some question and I don't know what happened, but he turned around and left. | ||
| So in my story, I was caught three times. | ||
| And at the first two times, I managed to, I don't know, manipulate them with two broken legs, trying to protect my life, like standing still. | ||
| I have one video from the first take-in and there were two terrorists and on the second time it was 10 terrorists. | ||
| What happened the second time? | ||
| I was by myself and it was a potato field. | ||
| So it's like a huge area with no place to hide. | ||
| It's just ground and it's, I don't know how to say it in English, but it's really curly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, like you cannot really run also. | |
| And I was completely exposed. | ||
| I was able to hide. | ||
| And I heard screaming in Arabic again. | ||
| And I saw this group of 10 Arabs, 10 terrorists running towards me. | ||
| I had nothing to do. | ||
| I just sat down and waited for them to come. | ||
| And when they came, again, something control over my head started screaming, you have to do what he did at the first time. | ||
| And I pretend to be an Arab again. | ||
| And it was like a lot of screaming and between 10 to 15 minutes, you know, this whole situation. | ||
| I don't remember so much about that situation except of the fact that at one point it asked me, where will we go? | ||
| And I was like, you're releasing me? | ||
| I'll go whenever. | ||
| And I'm standing on two broken legs still, you know. | ||
| And I think that they heard, like, they thought that the army is coming because they heard an explosion and they ran away. | ||
| And they left me in there. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| I had no necklace on my neck anymore. | ||
| I gave it as a present to try to manipulate again, doing whatever I can to take me out of this situation and survive with situations that I don't understand what is happening. | ||
| Completely confused, you know. | ||
| And I walked a few steps and I chose to do the one thing that we were not allowed to do at that day. | ||
| And I screamed so loud for help. | ||
| I thought that this is it. | ||
| You know, I didn't see nobody and then I heard screaming in Arabic from my back. | ||
| I'm looking around. | ||
| I looked at my back and I see one mile away from me, 13 Hamas terrorists running towards me and that was it. | ||
| Something told me in my head, you have to let go. | ||
| It's happening. | ||
| And I remember I answered, like, out loud. | ||
| What is happening? | ||
| And when they came, it was done. | ||
| No talking. | ||
| They pulled me from the tree, started to drag me, beat me up on the way. | ||
| And one of them, he decided to rip off all of my jewelry from me and he ripped everything from me. | ||
| It was a ton of jewelry on me and at one point he cut my hand off and they understood that I'm stalling them. | ||
| They picked me up and something again told me in my head, you have to let go. | ||
| I mean, release all your muscle, release me your mind because this is a situation that I cannot even imagine or handle, you know? | ||
| Do you remember where they were saying anything to you? | ||
| Were they saying anything to each other? | ||
| They were screaming so loudly. | ||
| They were celebrating. | ||
| And I remember from the body language that they were, like, not expecting. | ||
| They were looking at me as a trophy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And they don't see me even as a woman, you know? | ||
| They see me just as flesh and blood, something that you have to eliminate or destroy or kill or whatever. | ||
| They didn't even understand what to do with me, you know, at one point. | ||
| They just took me, dragged me and they don't have a car so they dragged me by foot and at one point they are understanding that I'm stalling them. | ||
| And so they picked me up, started to throw me out from one to another. | ||
| They don't see me as a human being. | ||
| I'm just flesh and blood and that's it. | ||
| And at that point I always say, you know, it's one after another, one worst case after another. | ||
| And the worst of the worst is that they will find a car before somebody will find me and that's happening. | ||
| And at that point we were eleven people inside that car, ten men and me. | ||
| And I didn't see nobody, no hostages, no people around. | ||
| So I feel in my brain that this is all for me, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| No. | ||
| They caught me. | ||
| My friends managed to run away and they caught me, you know. | ||
| So starting a fight in my brain. | ||
| What is happening now? | ||
| My dead or alive, you know. | ||
| And towards the way, they were happy, beat me up on my head, in my legs, everywhere. | ||
| And then at one point, I said to myself, Close your eyes, I don't want to see it. | ||
| Like, I understand what is going to happen now. | ||
| Like I said, I served in the army, I know the drill. | ||
| And the worst of the worst is the entrance to Gaza. | ||
| Because at that point, and I want to stop and say before that, I'm a person that was just seeking for peace before, you know. | ||
| And even today, today I'm not using the word peace, it wants my brothers and sisters back. | ||
| But before that, I had Arab neighbors, I had Arab friends, I was in a coexisting living city in Be'ersheva. | ||
| It's like we don't feel this situation that everybody is speaking about because everybody has the same rights, everybody can walk in the street freely, and everything is okay, you know. | ||
| So I always say that if somebody will stop to check who's the people that they chose to kidnap, they will be blown away. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because all of us, most of us, most of us are sure. | |
| Most of us as Arab, you know, even in the army, in the war place, in life, you know, they're living between us. | ||
| It's not, you know, foreign. | ||
| My grandmother is Egyptian. | ||
| She was speaking to me Arab till I was 17. | ||
| It's not foreign for me. | ||
| Wearing an Arabic necklace as a Jewish person, you know. | ||
| But at that point, I saw entrance to Gaza. | ||
| The terrorists is being happy, pulling me by the hair, wanting me to open my eyes and see. | ||
| And I saw 100 civilians, 100% of civilians, celebrating me being kidnapped, me being brutally, violently beaten up during the way, and they're happy. | ||
| And they're screaming, God is great, and everything is okay. | ||
| And the terror that I saw in their eyes was the minute that I chose to close my eyes again because I understood that if this car will stop in the middle of the crowd, I'm done. | ||
| And it happened. | ||
| The car stopped, and a few of the terrorists got out from the car, and I closed my eyes. | ||
| And I felt the crowd trying to pull me up. | ||
| I resisted and everything is seconds, you know, and had no way to protect myself. | ||
| Had my nails only, and I had a thought in my head that I will stuck them on the person that I'm sitting on. | ||
| I'm going to use him as a human weight if they will try to pull me again. | ||
| And I probably hurt him badly, I don't know, because he screamed, Chalas. | ||
| Somebody closed the door, and I always say that that was another moment in October 7th that I'm counting as a save. | ||
| You know, I was saved from a lynch, from being beaten up, from being killed by beating up. | ||
| And I'm in the middle of Gaza saying thank you for being saved. | ||
| That's the situation. | ||
| And from this point on, you know, the journey starts. | ||
| Do you want to look around a little bit? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so ask me whatever. | |
| Okay, so you're out, you're now out. | ||
| And they grab you, and then they immediately, and there's all these civilians, and everyone's cheering, and your legs are broken, and all the stuff. | ||
| And you speak out. | ||
| So at that point, you just decided not to speak anymore or try to plead. | ||
| At this point on, I had a journey till I got to the first house. | ||
| I had 11 moves in 54 days and five different houses. | ||
| And the first place I went to is the hospital. | ||
| And in the hospital, I saw about 30 Hamas terrorists inside a small room looking on top of me. | ||
| One is taking off my shoes, one is taking off the thing from my pocket. | ||
| And I'm saying to myself, I'm done. | ||
| I'm going to be killed now. | ||
| And I'm preparing myself to being killed, you know. | ||
| And seconds, you know, passing by, and I see somebody is putting a cast on one of my legs. | ||
| And I'm saying, okay, if you put a cast, I'm not being killed now. | ||
| I have to put on every effort that I can find to remember everything and to survive, you know. | ||
| And from that point on, they took me to the first house. | ||
| I was throwing into a small mattress covered with a sheet. | ||
| And when they took the sheet off, I saw an investigator in front of my face. | ||
| And he was happy. | ||
| And he was constantly saying to me that God loves me and I was saved. | ||
| And I couldn't understand what he was saying. | ||
| And I was crying, you know. | ||
| I was allowing myself still to cry at that point. | ||
| And he's speaking to you in Arabic, obviously. | ||
| He was speaking to me in Arabic. | ||
| I understood a little bit from what I remember from my grandmother. | ||
| And at that point, he grabbed my pants and he was angry and started asking, Where do you serve? | ||
| Where did you serve? | ||
| And I was like, Why are you asking me this question? | ||
| I'm not a soldier. | ||
| And that I understood what I was wearing. | ||
| I was wearing green army-like look-like uniform and army boots. | ||
| And I stopped crying immediately. | ||
| And he considered me as a soldier from that point on. | ||
| So my journey in this whole captivity situation was really bad for me because they thought I'm a soldier and I'm hiding information from them. | ||
| And I'm 40 years old, so I must be, you know, an important officer. | ||
| And why am I wearing uniform? | ||
| And you need to deal with so many conspiracy that it's like I don't know even how to deal in this situation. | ||
| What do I need to do to force you to believe that I'm saying the truth, you know? | ||
| Nothing helped. | ||
| And with every word that I knew to say, they thought that I know Arabic fluently, and that was it for me. | ||
| I was constantly behaving differently for me, you know, inside all the houses in there. | ||
| When you were moved from house to house, were you with any other people that were kidnapped, or were you always... | ||
| So after two hours that I was in the house, understanding that I was in a bad situation, they brought into the room this young girl, 18 years old, barefoot, in her pyjama, with long, bright hair and bright eyes. | ||
| And I was like, she is not Arab for sure, but who is she? | ||
| And they didn't let us talk for three days. | ||
| We were not allowed to speak. | ||
| We were not allowed to cry. | ||
| We were not allowed to sing. | ||
| We were allowed to sit and be still, you know. | ||
| But I was trying to communicate with them immediately. | ||
| Because, you know, in my head, I need to know what are you planning to do with me. | ||
| And I need to know how to protect her because she was so young. | ||
| Eventually, I realized that this is Nago Vais and she's 18 years old and she was kidnapped from her house in Beri. | ||
| And her dad was murdered and still being kept hostage in Gaza. | ||
| And her mother was also taken hostage. | ||
| And, you know, this is a situation that I'm in with this foreign child. | ||
| You know, I need to be her mother now. | ||
| And that was the situation in every house. | ||
| And you couldn't communicate with her in any way. | ||
| Not at the beginning. | ||
| And they were sleeping with us in the room. | ||
| They were always happy. | ||
| They brought people from my side to see the price. | ||
| You know, this is what we brought, asking questions, telling about our stories, you know, using conspiracies. | ||
| And all we need to do is be amen to every word they say, you know. | ||
| So at one point, you understand that you need to release everything. | ||
| This is not yours anymore. | ||
| But I have one thing that is mine from the beginning till the end. | ||
| That was my mind and my faith. | ||
| But that's it. | ||
| They took my name, they took my freedom, they did whatever they want with me, you know. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| You need to accept the situation. | ||
| But in my head, the will to leave was so much stronger for everything they tried to do with me. | ||
| And, you know, I'm talking about the situation because I was like the head communicator in the room. | ||
| And constantly, every day was for me, starting from the beginning. | ||
| I don't curse them. | ||
| I don't yell. | ||
| I don't do any bad behavior. | ||
| I respect them and I understand that I have to respect them because I want to be respected as well and I want to leave, you know. | ||
| But, you know, at one point I had to entertain them for over 13 hours. | ||
| I had to play with them cards, make them happy, make them laugh, you know? | ||
| And I'm hungry. | ||
| And at one point, I probably said something wrong, which till today I'm trying to understand what was it. | ||
| But in seconds, there was a gun pointed to my head, being threatened again and again and again. | ||
| And every day was that. | ||
| Starting from zero, asking them, what do you want? | ||
| Why are you so angry? | ||
| Why are you so full of hate, you know? | ||
| I mean, how does that support you in life? | ||
| Why aren't you, you know, one you know, I always say in my lecture that the difference between us and them, that's also bad for us and also good for us. | ||
| We are individuals. | ||
| Each and every one of us has different dreams and goals and we are working for that and that was get us involved as a human society, you know? | ||
| But they get up every morning for 54 days, which that's what I saw, putting the carpet on the floor, taking their prayer, and in the prayer, you put in a purpose of elimination, extermination, and hate. | ||
| Why? | ||
| And I couldn't understand that. | ||
| till the last day I was trying to communicate with them. | ||
| Being threatened with a gun, being beaten up, being abused, being starved. | ||
| I was sitting there with two broken legs. | ||
| I was sitting there with lyses on my head and that amount that I cannot explain to you because I had everything that you can imagine on my head. | ||
| So physically I was broken. | ||
| I lost eight kilos from my weight in 54 days. | ||
| There were days that this is it. | ||
| You have one half of pita and that's it. | ||
| But you smell the food that they eat from the other room. | ||
| I mean you have food. | ||
| And in the Korean it says you need to live equally like us, you know, even if you took somebody hostage, you need to live equally with him. | ||
| And every time it was abuse in any way, but the worst of the worst was the mental abuse. | ||
| Because every single day, investigation, conversation that you think that is on your side now, but then eventually he take everything, all the information and pass it on to all the other people. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I tried my best every single day. | ||
| And so they're moving you around. | ||
| Was that because then the war started? | ||
| Or in essence, Israel went into Gaza? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And they just kept moving you guys and you just had no idea what was happening. | ||
| But you need to understand that the houses were exploding not only from our rockets. | ||
| There were missile launchers next to the houses. | ||
| And if they knew they're going to launch missiles at that die, they took us away from the window because they knew it's going to be exploded. | ||
| On the second day, our window was shattered. | ||
| And it was not because of us, you know. | ||
| So I'm asking, you're using us as human shields. | ||
| You take your own people's houses and you put us in. | ||
| And then you put all your other people in danger, you know? | ||
| Why aren't you protecting them? | ||
| Why aren't you using this amount of money that you got like a few years ago and building shelters? | ||
| Why aren't you giving them the way to be new education, put new education in the school? | ||
| Why is everything against? | ||
| And that's what I say to, you know, I met one poor Palestinian, really, really smart person from UCLA. | ||
| And he has many followers after him. | ||
| And I asked him one question. | ||
| If you already have that power, why aren't you trying to communicate and combine and connect that this thing will not happen again to neither of the sides? | ||
| Why are you still using this power for violence, for aggression, for the wrong purpose, you know? | ||
| So I'm asking today, where are we going to? | ||
| What are we trying to achieve by doing that? | ||
| And eventually, I have my people. | ||
| I will be there back as much as I can, you know, because they took our freedom when we didn't try to fight them back. | ||
| And you'll see around so many exhibitions that explains how people feel. | ||
| It's not belong to the place. | ||
| It's like outside artists and they're trying to put their emotions in this situation that we cannot bear anymore. | ||
| And if you ask each and every person in here, in the square, they will tell you one thing. | ||
| We just want our people back. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| None of us want to get up in the morning and be in a war. | ||
| Every one of us, be sure of it. | ||
| We want to leave. | ||
| We like to leave. | ||
| Yeah, it could be over tomorrow if they wanted it to be over tomorrow. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Was there any moment that you thought you were going to be rescued before you were rescued? | ||
| Or did you have any sense of it? | ||
| Or was there anyone, did you meet, did any of them offer you any sympathy or try, was there any one of them that was a little better to you or you sort of referenced that you had someone that you could speak to and then they kind of turned on you? | ||
| Did you see any humanity at any point? | ||
| I don't even really care in some sense. | ||
| You know, I really like that question because I have two faces for my answer. | ||
| What is humanity? | ||
| When I sat there and I looked at Hansa, we tried, maybe in his brain, maybe. | ||
| Are you talking about the UCLA guy? | ||
| No, no, no, no, no, I'm talking about one of the terrorists inside. | ||
| I mean, one of the terrorists inside, he was trying to be good. | ||
| Let's take that, for example. | ||
| What is humanity? | ||
| If I'm hungry and no food is coming to me, and I'm looking at him and I'm saying, I'm hungry. | ||
| And he said, well, Israel blocked the line of food, but I smell the food that they eat from the other room. | ||
| So what is humanity? | ||
| That he gave me a smile in the morning. | ||
| I didn't get back home. | ||
| I didn't get the medical treatment that I needed. | ||
| I didn't get food. | ||
| I had days. | ||
| I had one day that really, that was the day that I thought everything will be done. | ||
| I had food poison so severe that by the end of that day I had 180 pulls. | ||
| I couldn't stand. | ||
| I couldn't raise my head. | ||
| I couldn't do anything. | ||
| And I was starting to say goodbye for my family. | ||
| Do you know how much water I had in those days? | ||
| 20 milliliters of salty water. | ||
| But he told me that that's the budget for the next two days. | ||
| So I need to calculate the water that I drink. | ||
| So I told the other hostage, trying to, you know, showing her, you know, I'm strong, we will survive this situation. | ||
| Don't worry, we'll drink one cap, one cap every hour just to get the mouth wet, you know, and then I calculate it. | ||
| It would be enough for two days, you know? | ||
| That's the situation that we needed to be at. | ||
| Did he give me medical care at that situation? | ||
| Did he heard my screams that I couldn't scream because I was not allowed to scream? | ||
| I couldn't cry because I was not allowed to cry. | ||
| I hear testimonies of other hostages that were in the hospital with gunshots. | ||
| No anesthesia. | ||
| Every single day when they come to clean the wounds, no anesthesia. | ||
| You feel everything when they have the option to give you anesthesia. | ||
| And just to be clear, so this is they're eating fine. | ||
| They're eating just fine. | ||
| And that's a medical. | ||
| Well, you know, I'm looking on the small things. | ||
| I had, I don't know how to say it, but I was covered, like covered, full covered with spikes. | ||
| Because when I was hiding, I was on a spiky. | ||
| You don't feel anything, really. | ||
| But on the third day, I started to feel that, you know, I had infections in some places all over. | ||
| And I asked him if I could, I didn't ask even. | ||
| I was trying to take them out by myself and he saw it from the side and he was smiling. | ||
| He brought a pinch and I asked him if I can do it by myself because I know it's really painful, you know. | ||
| And he was smiling and he said, no. | ||
| Give me your hands and he started taking them one after another. | ||
| And he didn't care that he taken my skin off, you know, with it. | ||
| And when I said, ow, he said, shh, no screaming. | ||
| So you need to sit down like this, like a robot, and wait for him to finish, you know? | ||
| So what is humanity? | ||
| That he left with me at some points, but then he shattered me with no hope to come back home. | ||
| What is humanity that he brought me maybe one extra spoon to three people? | ||
| Or when he gave me four showers in 54 days when the shower is a bucket of water that I need to split to three people. | ||
| So what is humanity? | ||
| When you have the option. | ||
| They did it. | ||
| They were clean. | ||
| They looked at us every day. | ||
| You know, they opened the door one day and one of the terrorists took the shirt and put it on his mouth. | ||
| And I looked at him and I said, but you did it. | ||
| You made this happen. | ||
| We are not, you call us filthy, you know. | ||
|
unidentified
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We don't have the option to get clean. | |
| They don't understand it. | ||
| That's why I always say they must be educated from the beginning to understand what is human beings lives. | ||
| And when I see one mother in Gaza, I saw this a few days ago. | ||
| I was shocked. | ||
| About all her children. | ||
| No, not the nine children. | ||
| Yeah, I saw that. | ||
| One mother before that that nobody heard about. | ||
| And I saw that video, it's on his Instagram, being so proud that her four children died when they tried to explode themselves to kill other people. | ||
| And she said she waited. | ||
| She has two more grandchildren and she can't wait for them to die too. | ||
| So I'm asking, what am I fighting against? | ||
| It will never meet. | ||
| Because we celebrate life. | ||
| We're trying to, you know, show the living and the dead as alive. | ||
| But you don't care about your own people. | ||
| So what am I fighting with? | ||
| And that's what I'm trying to tell. | ||
| I mean, you know, at some point I feel sorry for them, but that's the life that they need to live. | ||
| They don't have the options to dream, you know. | ||
| I mean, no matter what I went through, and I'm telling you, I was abused almost every day. | ||
| I still tried to take one of the captures and to explain to him how Thailand looks like to me because he never left the borders of Gaza. | ||
| And I was trying to tell him that there are Palestinians in England, you know, and there are Palestinians all over the world. | ||
| Why are you closing here? | ||
| And at one point I was doing him guided imagination, you know, trying to take him and his wife and his children to, you know, to the beach in Thailand. | ||
| And his body language, you know, she raised up. | ||
| And at one point, like a balloon, fell down and he says, no, Hamas will kill me. | ||
| He doesn't have the option to think beyond the borders that he put in his mind. | ||
| So again, what am I fighting with? | ||
| They need to be educated all over again. | ||
| any person that has something bad to say about that situation needs to be educated all over again from our side and their side too you know and so so all right 54 days Tell me about day 54. | ||
| No, it's not day 54. | ||
| It's day 53. | ||
| It's actually day 49. | ||
| They took us from the house and they told us that we are going home. | ||
| And something felt bad. | ||
| You know, I didn't feel, it didn't feel right. | ||
| And I told the girl next to me that she just needs to be, you know, in focus to see that everything is okay. | ||
| Now I'm next to her. | ||
| And they took us in the street for four hours trying to get to the extent point because we are going home. | ||
| And at that point, one of the terrorists came from my back, pulled me by the shirt, whispering in my ear, not you, not now. | ||
| And I couldn't even say goodbye to the girl next to me. | ||
| He dragged me back into Gaza and they took them back home. | ||
| And I was dragged to an abandoned house. | ||
| I don't remember how long I was in there, but for me, I felt this deep. | ||
| And I couldn't really believe them because they folded me from that point on three times that I'm going home and there was daylight and I'm still in Gaza. | ||
| I'm not home. | ||
| So when they came to me on day 53 and they told me that this did I'm moving to the last house, I didn't really believe them. | ||
| And that journey was the worst of everything that happened till that point. | ||
| They covered my eyes. | ||
| They were really violent to me, dragging me in the street. | ||
| And when I got to the point, I saw eight other hostages. | ||
| I was so shocked because I saw, you know, young children and women and old women. | ||
| And I didn't understand the situation because I was not exposed to neither radio or television till that point. | ||
| Did you try to speak to each other at that point? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I mean, we have our ways, you know, we speak with our eyes, we speak with our whispers, we're making marks. | ||
| We found ways to speak, to communicate, but it was not allowed. | ||
| And really fast knowing their story, I was completely shocked. | ||
| You know, some of them were from the kibbutz, some of them were taken from the way, some of them from the Nova Festival, and, you know, 18-year-old boys, you know, 113 girl. | ||
| Horrible stories, but after 27 hours, 27 hours, when the point that they told us we're going home till the point that they took us to the Red Corus, and we really thought it's not going to happen. | ||
| Managed to, you know, hold the last hope that we have left. | ||
| And at that point, they took us to the Red Cross. | ||
| We saw the Red Cross. | ||
| Then we started to hear the screamings from our back. | ||
| And our release was the longest one because we were back home only at 3.30 a.m. in the middle of the night. | ||
| And I really thought that we're not going to see our home now screaming from the back. | ||
| They're going to come and kill us now, you know. | ||
| And the entire road was really, really bad. | ||
| But then I got a phone call inside a car and the driver gave me the phone. | ||
| And it was a soldier from the other line speaking to me in Hebrew, saying to me, you're safe. | ||
| You're on your way home. | ||
| Tell me who's injured. | ||
| Tell me who needs aid care, you know. | ||
| Was Red Cars in the car with you at that point? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And were they helpful in any way? | ||
| You know, for me, everybody laughed at me because in my story, when I was released, I didn't understand that we are being filmed to the entire world, you know. | ||
| And I was so happy that I was out. | ||
| And you will see it if you look it up in Google that I grabbed all of the driver of the Red Cross and to a hug because I was really thanking them for taking me home and not knowing that why didn't you come to see us. | ||
| Yeah, I mean they're basically visit us. | ||
| I mean and I was trying to communicate with that woman immediately asking her where were you? | ||
| Did they say anything? | ||
| And she said that the Hamas is not allowing them to come into Gaza and you know when we when they went off I took from one of them you know a cigarette and she gave me the pack and I told her no no no leave the pack because there is no cigarettes in Gaza and she said don't worry I'm fine I'm going back to Gaza tomorrow. | ||
| It's like why are you gonna get back to Gaza tomorrow? | ||
| And she said oh we are allowed to visit the children. | ||
| You're allowed to visit the children but not allowed to visit the hostages and you're still supporting that. | ||
| So I don't know what's still happening if it's happening still today but that's the answer she gave to me and I was shocked you know but then eventually they left we crossed the border and I saw the first officer and she came to me and you need to understand that I thought that Israel is burning and I thought that I don't have a home to come back to because they fill me with lies that what is happening in Egypt. | ||
| So what were they telling you? | ||
| They told me that everything was bombed and that I don't have a family to come back to and nobody is fighting for me and basically they told me that I'm not going to be released even if there will be a ceasefire because I'm a soldier and no hope from them that's for sure. | ||
| I didn't hear one of them coming to me and say I don't want this either. | ||
| We're in this situation. | ||
| Let's try to survive it, you know? | ||
| Did you believe them? | ||
| I mean, like, yeah, so you never feared that your family or... | ||
| No, no, no, I didn't believe them, but I was afraid of my mother. | ||
| She's an old woman, and she's by herself, and I'm her younger child, you know, and what am I expecting her to do, you know? | ||
| What everybody's expecting from my mother to do. | ||
| She was broken, you know, and she survived for me. | ||
| For me, my hope every day that don't do anything, don't fight for me, just survive, you know? | ||
| Just wait till I come back home, because I was so afraid that she will have a heart attack or something, and it was not far away from that, you know? | ||
| And she didn't eat, she didn't drink, she didn't do anything, and even after I came back home, she didn't want to open the news, because she felt bad, because she got her daughter back, and there are so many other mothers that didn't get their children back, you know? | ||
| So, what is the world expecting from our mothers to do, or our fathers, or our sisters, or our brothers, you know? | ||
| Of course, they will fight for us. | ||
| Of course, I have four different cousins that went on looking for me, you know? | ||
| They didn't care that they have children back home. | ||
| They didn't care that they have wives back home. | ||
| They were trying just to look for me. | ||
| They didn't try to take nobody else's life. | ||
| And I wish... | ||
| I wish, I wish that people will be just lighting up and open their eyes for a second to understand what do you want? | ||
| What do you want to get up to? | ||
| That's it, it's that simple. | ||
| What do you support? | ||
| I don't support babies being killed. | ||
| I don't support that my brothers are being held in tunnels, being starved, being beaten, being abused, being psychology, you know, mentally war every single day. | ||
| What do you expect? | ||
| What do you want? | ||
| That's it. | ||
| It's that simple. | ||
|
unidentified
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I mean, you know, I'll take one example. | |
| When I see the gay community supporting Gaza, and I'm just asking, do you know that they don't support you? | ||
| Do you know that our country supports you 100%? | ||
| One of the countries that fight for you every single day. | ||
| Like the strongest as possible. | ||
|
unidentified
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I mean, in here you can do, you can be free. | |
| So why are you against us? | ||
| Gays for Palestine is very different than gays in Palestine. | ||
| You know, I'm just taking one example. | ||
| I mean, you know, I read all the talkbacks, all the bad talks that I get. | ||
| Not the good ones, I read all the bad ones and I reply to each and every one of them. | ||
| And I didn't get that many. | ||
| But, you know, at one point, I got this message. | ||
| You've been brainwashed. | ||
| Are you nuts? | ||
| I felt it on my flesh and blood. | ||
| How do you think that I'm being brainwashed? | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm afraid of people being rejecting the truth. | |
| They deny the truth. | ||
| I felt it every single day inside captivity when they tried to build my story and it was not my story to tell. | ||
| And every single day, you know, one night there was so severe explosion and I heard one mother screaming. | ||
| And it's a mother that I heard for every single day. | ||
| I had my, you know, my sounds, my regular sounds that I was waiting to hear. | ||
| And at that day, her lefter was screaming. | ||
| And the terrorist came to the room and I asked him what happened. | ||
| He said that her child died. | ||
| And I cried. | ||
| And he almost beat me up for that. | ||
| And I told him, I'm not crying for me, I'm crying for her. | ||
| And he left it. | ||
| And he said, you are a slave. | ||
| You are a fox. | ||
| You are a manipulator. | ||
| You are whatever. | ||
| I was really crying for that mother, but that was not allowed to, you know. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't understand what else to do. | |
| else to say, that makes people understand that most of us, I will not say 100%, and I will not be angry on the people that not supported that, because I understand them. | ||
| You invade their houses, you kill their families, you took our everything, and not only for us, and for our termination as well. | ||
| My brother, my sister, they left their family. | ||
| They didn't see their families for four days. | ||
|
unidentified
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There are people in here, 603 days. | |
| They didn't do anything but to be here and fight for their families. | ||
| This is not just a one person sword. | ||
|
unidentified
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So I'm asking what to do more, you know. | |
| Tell me about the first moment that you touched another hand or hugged an Israeli or was it who was it first? | ||
| It was a soldier first? | ||
| So you speak to the soldier on the phone. | ||
| Yeah, I spoke with the soldier on the phone and then the interest to Israel, that was one officer that came to me and she told me that my family, everybody's alive, including my animals, and everybody's together, you know. | ||
| And I remember that I screamed so loudly and understood that I was allowed to express my emotion. | ||
| Finally, you know. | ||
| And I was picturing my mother every single day wearing the same clothes, you know. | ||
| And eventually when I saw her, she was wearing the same clothes I was picturing in my head. | ||
| And I said it out loud to the host, still in Gaza, so it will not be just in my head, you know. | ||
| And that only shows you, you know, how much belief and attention and goal and purpose I had to see my mother. | ||
| And I manifested every single day. | ||
| And when I saw her, when I saw my father, when I saw my sister and brother, you know, this is beyond miracle. | ||
| It's beyond the best achievement that I have had in my entire life, you know, to be able to hug my family again. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| For me, I was smiling. | ||
| They were crying and then we just immediately started to fight for everybody else. | ||
| At that point, that's a name that I've taken with me everywhere. | ||
| At that point, I still had one friend inside. | ||
| His name is Vitaisdilsky. | ||
| He was 38 years old. | ||
| He was a culture, positive person. | ||
| He obeyed them. | ||
| He did everything they asked him to do. | ||
| And eventually one day I was so uneasy and I kept driving everybody crazy and I felt something bad happened to him and they told me nothing happened to him. | ||
| I said, something bad happened to him. | ||
| I really feel it in my bones, you know. | ||
| And the funny thing is, I was with him only for two days. | ||
| That's the amount of the connection. | ||
| He was murdered that day. | ||
| And the Haman sent the video of his body. | ||
| And I remember that nobody wanted me to see. | ||
| And I forced them to show me because I couldn't believe that he was gone. | ||
| And for him, I'm saying that I still have this good picture in my head. | ||
| And not that body that I saw, you know, it was not even warfaring. | ||
| But he didn't get back home. | ||
| And he really fought for me inside because they kept telling him that I will not be released. | ||
| And he kept fighting for me, trying to convince them that I'm not a soldier. | ||
| And eventually he was murdered. | ||
|
unidentified
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And he will not come back home, you know? | |
| Is there anything else you want to say? | ||
| You said something about your faith before and belief in God, which I assume I have no doubt has been tested in unimaginable ways throughout this. | ||
| That's the one thing that really puts a smile on my face when I hear other testimonies from hostages that came out, how much faith hold them, help them every single day, because this is a situation that you need to surrender to. | ||
| You have two options. | ||
| Either dead or alive. | ||
| What you're going to do now. | ||
| So I put it aside. | ||
| I was surrendering, surrendering, saying, you know what, you saved me so many times from a sure death so many times. | ||
| And I'm still alive. | ||
| So I'm going to take this faith on and I'm going to spread it everywhere I can because that's what held us inside. | ||
| We had nothing. | ||
| We had nothing. | ||
| And if you ask, you know, about the sixth hostages that was murdered inside the tunnel, you know that one fact is that from their body language, they were not afraid when the gun was pointed to their faces because they accepted the situation. | ||
| They have nothing to do with it. | ||
| And they just try to protect themselves. | ||
| That's the body language that they found the bodies. | ||
| And I wish and I hope that I know that this is the only thing that makes them survive every single day for 603 days. | ||
| The stories that they tell is no different than us except for the fact that it's still going on. | ||
| And how much does a person have, you know, to hold on another day and another day of another day of abuse and starvation? | ||
| How much we have to stop it really, really fast. | ||
| And I really hope that they have the faith to keep on doing it and keep on getting up every single morning. | ||
| You know, I found myself tons of times saying thank you every day because it's not obvious that I have food in my mouth and it's not obvious that I had water and it's not obvious that I survived another day for the will of life. | ||
| That's what helped me. | ||
| And when two terrorists came into my room proudly, putting their hand on their heart and saying, you know, why we'll be okay and you're not. | ||
| And I said, why? | ||
| They said, because we don't have nothing in our heart. | ||
| We don't have emotion and we don't care. | ||
| We wait to die. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| We wait to leave. | ||
| We just want to live. | ||
| We don't want to die. | ||
| We want to survive. | ||
| And not only to survive, we want to live. | ||
| And that's the only message that I have to everybody that will watch it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Please choose what's your goal in the morning. | |
| What do you want? | ||
| And if you think that something is bad, try to change it to the better, not fight against it and doing the same thing that you think you're being done in, you know? | ||
| Choose differently, that's all. | ||
| You know, I've interviewed presidents and prime ministers and everyone you can think of, and you are without question the most extraordinary person that I've ever chatted with, period. |
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