Aviva Siegel: After ‘51 days of hell’, former hostage haunted by fear for husband

There was so little air in this space that she was too weak to lift her head, or to speak. After a while she prayed for death to end the agony of suffocation.

Almost every detail of her 51 days in Hamas captivity ­remain as fresh as the day she was released last year.

Ms Siegel remembers the ­jubilation of the Gazan crowds upon her arrival in the territory, and the feeling of the sand on the floor of the tunnel where she was kept. She remembers, and aches, for the girls – the ones still there who she witnessed being subjected to unspeakable acts of abuse.

And more than anything she longs for Keith, her beloved ­husband of 43 years, left behind by a deal that was struck to set her free. Ms Siegel might be here, in the safety of Israel, but her heart remains in Gaza: in a filthy room, with a weakened Keith, somewhere in the territory’s miserable ruins.

“I’m still there,” she said.

Ms Siegel told her story to The Weekend Australian to mark the one-year anniversary of the October 7 massacres in ­Israel, when terrorists stormed her southern village of Kfar Aza and slayed many of the civilian population of its peace-seeking agrarian community.

Recollections from that day still turn her stomach on cue.

She and Keith were sheltering from rocket fire when terrorists raided their home, shot Keith in the hand, and drove them both over the border – in their car – towards a house in the vicinity of Jabaliya, a Gazan neighbourhood where crowds cheered along the route.

Still dressed in their pyjamas, Ms Siegel and Keith, aged 65, were moved from the car into the house at gunpoint. Both of them were trembling.

Aviva Siegel begged for her life as a hostage for 51 days. Now she’s begging for her husband’s.

“After four steps, in the living room, there was a hole and I’ll never forget the terrorist looking up to me (from a ladder inside) with the biggest smile ever, happy, and telling me to come down,” she said.

Over the next 51 days, ­Ms Siegel was moved 13 times while ­Israel advanced a ground campaign to degrade Hamas’s fighting capacity and leverage its leadership – most of whom are now dead – into making a deal to release the hostages.

That moment arrived in ­November, but during the intervening period Ms Siegel said she was starved and physically assaulted, lived in constant fear of death and was “treated like dirt” by “brutal, disgusting terrorists”. Upon returning to Israel, she had lost 10kg and couldn’t walk unaided. But that was after a much shorter length of time in Gaza compared with those who still remain in the territory. She struggles to consider the impact that a year in captivity will have caused to Keith and the other hostages.

Israeli authorities say 101 hostages remain in the territory, a third of whom are believed to be dead. Diplomatic efforts to secure their liberty have all but broken down in recent months, the most recent collapsing over a dispute involving the Philadelphi Corridor, a smuggling route in the south of Gaza.

Military extractions of some hostages have been successful, but these have been fraught with danger for officers involved, the hostages themselves, and other captives held nearby, who risk being murdered to prevent their escape.

One successful mission took place in June when Israeli officers disguised themselves as Gazans at apartment blocks in Nuseirat to save Noa Argamani, 26, Andrei Kozlov, 27, Meir Jan, 22, and Shlomi Ziv, 41, a mission later dubbed Operation Arnon, in honour of Arnon Zamora, an officer who died from wounds sustained during the rescue. Two months later, Israeli troops advancing on a tunnel in the Gazan city of Rafah discovered Farhan al-Qadi, a 52-year-old Bedouin hostage who was saved while wandering a tunnel system by himself. His captors had fled after hearing the Israeli advance.

Hamas responded by ordering its men to shoot captives dead in the event of further rescue attempts. Days after finding al-Qadi, Israeli soldiers advancing through nearby tunnels located the bodies of six hostages: Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, Eden Yerushalmi, 24, Ori Danino, 25, Alex Lobanov, 32, Carmel Gat, 40, and Almog Sarusi, 27. Kept in a space too narrow for people to stand side by side and too low for an adult to stand straight, the bodies were skeletal. The victims had been shot in the face. Medical estimates determined they were murdered within the previous 48 hours.

Despite the precarious nature of making a deal with Hamas, Ms Siegel hasn’t relinquished hope that it’s possible. She has thrown herself into lobbying efforts here and abroad, meeting twice with US President Joe Biden and seven times with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. They met with her because Keith is an American citizen, a fact he kept hidden in captivity because it may have seen him released before his wife.

She has also spoken with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and worked alongside fellow hostages, their families and survivors of October 7 to advance the prospect of a deal – at virtually any cost. But Israeli society is divided between those hoping to free the hostages by any means necessary and those who say a deal would only repopulate Gaza with terrorists. A deal, they say, would pose a future threat to Israel’s ­security and make a return to the southern villages untenable.

“I just don’t understand how people can talk against a deal,” the 63-year-old said. “It’s so cruel what the hostages are going through. We went through hell, we really went through hell.”

Each day in Gaza was even worse than the last, Ms Siegel said.

If it wasn’t being abandoned in a pitch-black tunnel without enough oxygen, then it was the cruelty of the guards, or the constant fear that the building around her would collapse from rocket fire. The walls would shake with every blast, Ms Siegel said.

Her mind had wholly disconnected from her body on arrival in Gaza. She spoke of being suspended in “utter shock” while crowds cheered outside the window of her car. A terrorist held a knife to her face throughout her journey over the border; another sat in the front with a pointed gun.

“When we arrived in Gaza there were so many people waiting for us – children, babies, older people – everybody was standing, clapping hands, shouting, shooting in the air, and they knew we were coming, and they were waiting for us,” she said.

She and Keith were forced into the tunnels using a series of ladders and then were marched down a passage and instructed to sit when the arched, concrete ceiling became too low to stand. Keith, she said, could barely breathe at that depth and was nursing several broken ribs in addition to a gunshot wound.

And just like that, the terrorists escorting them disappeared in the dark “without saying anything”, without leaving food, water or medical assistance.

Inside the tunnel was another hostage, Chen Almog-Goldstein and three of her children. Her 20-year-old daughter, Yam, had been shot in her face in Kfar Aza; her husband, Nadav, aged 48, had been shot in the chest. Together they spent days lying on the floor, mostly in silence, the shortage of air making it difficult to comfort one another. Ms Siegel said they were too weak to move.

“I just prayed all the time, ‘please, let me die first’,” she said. “I do not want to see Keith dead.”

Aviva’s husband, Keith Samuel Siegel, is still being held hostage by Hamas.

Even a terrorist who returned days later seemed taken aback by the conditions in which they’d been left; but he shrugged and said there was nothing he could do.

“He said, ‘Very very bad, no oxygen, but no house’,” Ms Siegel said. “And I’ll never forget the minute he said that. I was sure that we were going to die. It was just such a scary moment, lying there underneath the ground while it’s dark, left alone, with nothing – with nobody to take care of us.”

Conditions weren’t much better when they were finally moved. Instead of being housed with a Gazan family, as some hostages have since reported, Ms Siegel and her group of hostages were placed with armed Hamas operatives who relished in terrorising them.

The terrorists laughed when an injured and deteriorating Keith would beg for water. They gorged on food in front of Ms Siegel and the others who weren’t being fed, or who received a dangerously low number of calories. An elderly woman, Elma Abraham, aged 85, said that upon her release that she was given just two dates a day on which to live.

Talking or expressing emotions was punished. The slightest movement to adjust one’s body, to relieve soreness, would incur their captors’ wrath. “We behaved all the time,” Ms Siegel said, but punishments were meted out anyway.

An enraged terrorist once pulled a girl by the hair onto the floor and shoved a gun into her face thinking she had spoken out of turn; in fact she had been fitted with a hijab and voiced a fear, in Hebrew, that she might be separated from the group. Unsure of what she uttered, the girl was taken by her captor to another room, handcuffed, then covered with a blanket and beaten “into pieces”, Ms Siegel said. “I heard that and could not scream. And when she came back you could see she was red all over.”

Another girl went through “the worst thing any girl can go through” when a terrorist held a gun to her head and “just told her what to do and did everything he wanted to do – I just even can’t say that by words, it’s too difficult for me, but I was there, I saw that”.

Sometimes the hostages were blindfolded and taken from their rooms to film Hamas propaganda videos. Ms Siegel said she and Keith were given scripts that had to be read word for word, the terrorists angrily redoing each take if a minor detail was omitted. Keith always insisted that she not cry during the filming, saying that it would upset her four children and the rest of their family who would inevitably see the footage.

The last sign of life from Keith was in a video released in April. Pale, dressed in a black T-shirt, he appeared weak and very thin. And he was crying in the video. “I just know that Keith is in danger because he wanted to show us that he’s strong and that he’s okay. But he’s not strong and he’s not okay.”