“I don’t think he’ll come back, but I will fight for his body.”
The memory of October 7 is unclear, but what young Ziv Abod (26) does not forget is the fear in the eyes of her partner Elia Cohen (27). “He was not afraid of anything, but that day His look said it all: he was terrified“, he assures RTVE.es, remembering their last moment together. It was in a shelter, accompanied by about thirty people, who were trying to escape from the hundreds of Hamas fighters who had gathered at the concert. where they had gone “to dance and have fun” and who soon found them.
The last thing Elia said to his girlfriend before he was kidnapped was that he was “hurt.” By then, Hamas had thrown “nine grenades into the shelter”. All that was around the couple were dead bodies., “The grenade killed half the people before my eyes,” the young woman says during an event in Madrid organized by Voice for Freedom. Afterwards, militiamen came to take away those who were still alive, including her partner, but she was not able to do anything to resolve this.
“I’m alive because all the bodies fell on top of me,” Ziv says. He spent six hours under the corpses, When he woke up, he found them all dead, including his nephew and his girlfriend, who had accompanied them to the festival. 110 days later Eliya is still somewhere in the Gaza Strip, dead or alive. “We don’t know anything about him,” he laments.
On October 7, in an unprecedented attack on Israel, Hamas abducted more than 200 Israelis and dozens of people of various nationalities in one bloody day. At least 1,200 people died, Israel responded with promises to eliminate Hamas and launched a large-scale offensive into the Strip with ground and air strikes that are still ongoing, pushing the numbers higher. 25,000 Palestinians killed,
Kiev Abud holds a photo of her boyfriend kidnapped by Hamas
Three months later, 136 of the Israeli abductees remain in Gaza, while uncertainty grows among their families and friends who They demand a deal for their release,
“It’s like a nightmare”
Those who have not returned from Gaza include Ziv and Gali Bernan, 26-year-old twin brothers who worked as lighting technicians in the music industry and were abducted by Hamas from their home, andA kibbutz near Siderot, where he lived with his family. His older brother, Liran, who lives two hours away, He lost contact with them around 9:30 in the morning.When he stopped responding to her messages.
“At seven-thirty we saw on television the first trucks full of terrorists in Siderot, just seven minutes from my family’s kibbutz,” he told RTVE.es. He had woken up an hour earlier to the deafening sound of the alarm, not really understanding what was happening. “We talked on WhatsApp and They told me they heard gunshots and screams in ArabicSomething that had never happened before,” he says. After being missing for 10 days, Israeli authorities informed him that both Ziv and Gali were among the abducted.
In November, a four-day ceasefire was agreed between Israel and Hamas, bringing some relief to Gaza and giving hope to the families of those still held hostage by Hamas. In fact, Palestinian militias exchanged Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons in exchange for the release of some of them.
Liran Berman has a photo of his brothers
Only then did the Bernan family learn that Kiv and Gali were alive. “Some of the freed men had seen them,” says Liran, “but they were separated, and slightly wounded.” “Since, we heard nothing again“, he adds. “It’s like a nightmare, like one of those horror movies you see on television, but without being able to stop it, you have to watch it 24 hours a day, seven days a week Will happen,” he explains it. Medium.
Relatives of Hamas hostages camped outside Netanyahu’s house
“Since October 7, my life has been turned upside down.”
Both Kiv and Liran have been living without any answers for over 110 days Hopefully it gets even more difficult for them, They don’t know whether the medicines in the strips have reached there or not and their hopes of bringing them back to life are fading.
“I don’t think he will come back – Kiv confesses – but I will fight for him, even if it is for his body and he may not live,” he says. “If they had told me he died, I would have had to deal with that loss, and that was it,” says Kiv, who now lives alone in the house she once shared with Elia. He added, “But they did not kill him, he is in Gaza, they kidnapped him in his land and took him to another place… The people who attacked us, whom I saw with my own eyes. This It’s horrifying.”
Liran says the worst moment comes every night. “There are no good days now and I am able to sleep only with the help of medicine, otherwise everything is a nightmare,” he says. So far 110 people have been released and they are not hopeful that their brothers will also return home soon.