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"I Was Held by Hamas for 505 Days": How We Survived October 7
(Sunday Times-UK) Danny Scott - Eliya Cohen was with his girlfriend, Ziv Abud, at the Nova Festival on Oct. 7, 2023. As they tried to drive away from the rocket fire, they stopped at a bomb shelter. Eliiya said, "More people joined us in the shelter, but we were all talking and joking. Although it was scary, we had seen it before." "Then suddenly the terrorists were outside the shelter and they were going to kill us. A grenade rolled into the shelter and exploded. Another grenade and we are fighting, picking up the grenades and throwing them out of the door. It was like this for 40 minutes until the terrorists fired a rocket-propelled grenade." "Ziv fainted and I knew the only chance to save her was to bury her underneath the dead bodies. Two of those bodies were her nephew and his girlfriend." Eliya was shot in the leg and "then I was dragged out and loaded onto a truck. The last thing I saw was a terrorist pointing his gun into the shelter and firing a hundred bullets. I was sure Ziv was dead." "I was driven to Gaza and thousands of people were on the streets celebrating. I was more scared of these people than I was of the terrorists. The terrorists wanted to keep me alive, a hostage for negotiation. Those ordinary people wanted to kill me. They wanted the respect that would come from killing a Jew." "I was held for 505 days. In the tunnels was the worst - no light, no sleep, beatings, being stripped naked so they could laugh at us, no food, no water." And then he was released. Ziv tells her story: "The bomb shelter we were in on that day in 2023 - on Route 232 near Kibbutz Re'im - is now known as the shelter of death. The first grenade exploded and the sound, the smell, the dead bodies...not even bodies, arms and legs and blood. I was scared like I have never been scared before." "The last thing I remember is holding Eliya's hand and him covering me with dead bodies....I woke up at 11 a.m. and the attack had started at eight. There was me and six other survivors in the shelter, and we had no idea what was going to happen. Would the terrorists come back? We sat with our dead friends for seven hours until we were rescued." "When he was finally released and I saw him again, after 16 months, he was so thin, my Eliya, and like a ghost. When I was a child I heard people talk about the Holocaust and how much people hated Jews, but I thought that people had changed. Then I saw marches all over Europe, defending what had happened." "Of the people who were murdered, we knew 48 of them....I suffer from PTSD and still have nightmares."