A former hostage fought for her own life in Gaza. A year on, she fights for her husband’s freedom

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — As a hostage in Gaza, Aviva Siegel found herself begging for food and water. Since her release, she has found herself begging for her husband to be set free from his own ongoing captivity.

Siegel has come to embody the disaster that befell Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Armed Hamas militants snatched her from her home and thrust her into Gaza’s web of tunnels. Released during a brief cease-fire in November, she returned to find her community destroyed and became one of tens of thousands of Israelis displaced by conflict. She has emerged as a prominent voice in the struggle to free the remaining hostages, fighting tirelessly for her husband’s release.

But as her ordeal reaches the one-year mark, Israel’s attention is focused not on the plight of the hostages and their families, but on fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon. It’s the latest diversion to chip away at Siegel’s hope that she may reunite with her husband of 43 years anytime soon.

“The hostages, they are being left to die. To die slowly. How can I handle that? I just don’t know how to handle it anymore,” she said, sitting beside a poster of her husband, Keith, a 65-year-old American Israeli originally from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Her torment is all the more acute because she knows firsthand what her husband is enduring.

“Hostages were chained, tortured, starved, beaten up into pieces. I saw that in front of my eyes. That’s what they did to us,” she said from a short-term rental apartment in Tel Aviv, one of the many places she has lived since her return during the November cease-fire, the first and only deal reached between Israel and Hamas during the war.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to continue the war until “total victory” over Hamas and pledged to bring home the hostages, but has faced widespread criticism that dozens remain captive a year after the attack. Netanyahu has also argued that the pressure on Hezbollah will, in turn, lead to pressure on its ally Hamas and help speed up the release of the hostages.

The Siegels were jolted awake on Oct. 7 at their home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, one of the hardest-hit communities that day, by a burst of air raid sirens. Like so many others, they took cover in their safe room, built to protect against rocket attacks, that turned out to be no match for the rifle- and grenade-toting Hamas militants who stormed their home.

In its attack, Hamas kidnapped roughly 250 people, including women, children and older people. It killed some 1,200 people — most of them civilians — according to Israeli authorities. The war the attack sparked has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians, over half of them women and children, according to health officials in Gaza.

Hamas has said the hostages are treated humanely, but multiple accounts from freed hostages contradict that.

The militants led the Siegels out of their house, shoved her husband, breaking his ribs, and shot him in the hand, Siegel said. They were forced into their own car and driven into Gaza, where crowds of onlookers cheered at their capture.

Their first stop was a home with a living room that opened up into an underground tunnel.

“And there’s somebody underneath the hole, in the hole underneath the ground, that’s waiting with a smile, happy as can be. I’ll never forget his face,” she said.

They climbed down a steep ladder into the tunnel, one of several they were held in throughout Siegel’s 51 days in captivity. All told, Siegel was moved around 13 times, held in both tunnels and militants’ homes, she said.

On the first day, they were joined by other hostages and they were brought pita and cheese, which hardly anyone ate because they were all in shock. But throughout her captivity, food was scarce and Siegel said there were entire days when she wasn’t brought anything to eat.

“They used to starve us while they ate in front of us and not bring us water for hours and days. I had an infection in my stomach, I was dehydrated. We had to beg — beg — for water. Beg and beg for food.”

The first tunnel had light — others did not — as well as a fan that labored to circulate the scant air. Seven hostages were held in a room Siegel described as being about the size of three yoga mats. She found comfort in having her husband by her side throughout.

She brushed her teeth four times over those weeks and washed herself the same amount, in salt water.

“It’s disgusting. We were filthy. Dirty. The smell that came out of us is the worst that you can imagine,” she said.

But worse was the treatment from the guards. Siegel, a 63-year-old grandmother of five, said she was pushed and yanked by the hair and shoved into cars.

Her captors told her that Hamas had taken over her kibbutz and that Israel didn’t care about freeing her. So she was in disbelief when freedom came on Nov. 26. But it came at a price: Her husband was to remain behind.

Her parting words to him were, “Be strong for me,” and she promised to be strong for him.

Since their painful goodbye, she has crisscrossed Israel and the world, sharing her story and pleading for her husband’s release. She has met Netanyahu, United States President Joe Biden and United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, among others. She has spoken repeatedly to Israeli lawmakers and become a fixture at weekly protests in support of the hostages.

But her energetic advocacy has been beaten down by the horrific twists and turns of the war. Since her release, she has watched multiple rounds of hostage negotiations collapse. Hostages have been killed by Hamas but also mistakenly by Israeli forces, and some have been rescued.

The fighting in Israel’s north, and the stunning assassination of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, feels like another blow to her struggle, which has faded from the public consciousness.

Siegel said she can’t bring herself to watch a video of her husband that Hamas released in April. Clearly filmed under duress, he says he is OK, but breaks down in tears and lays his head on his knees, sobbing.

She finds the strength to soldier on by thinking about him, a vegetarian who loves reading books to his grandchildren and studied Arabic so he could converse with workers from Gaza who were employed in the kibbutz. But a year on, her hope is wearing thin.

“I don’t know why I get up,” she said. “But I do know that I have to get up for Keith.”

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