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NEW: Young Sisters Discuss Frequent Death Threats, Inhumane Conditions While Being Held Hostage By Hamas
WASHINGTON, D.C. – In new reports from Israeli media, freed hostages Dafna Elyakim, 15, and her 8-year-old sister, Ela Elyakim, shared that they received frequent death threats from Hamas and experienced inhumane living conditions while they were held hostage. The sisters, who are speaking publicly for the first time, also discussed the horrors they experienced during the October 7th massacre, when Hamas terrorists livestreamed their assault on Dafna and Ela’s home, and ultimately killed their father and two other family members.
In captivity, Dafna and Ela experienced “difficult conditions in the tunnels, where they stayed in a tiny room with a very low ceiling that didn’t allow them to stand up, and were barely given food and water.” Dafna experienced such severe psychological torture that even upon her release, “I thought it wasn’t real, that maybe we were still in Gaza. That suddenly a Hamas member would emerge and take me, that we would be taken again.”
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KEY EXCERPTS
- The terrorists who entered the Nahal Oz home documented the attack on Facebook Live, recording the family seated in the living room, where they were forced to identify themselves. Father Noam, shot in the leg, was seen in the live feed bleeding heavily as Dafna wept beside him, with Ela seated on [Noam’s partner] Dikla’s lap. The terrorists were filmed taking the couple’s identity cards and forcing Noam and [Dikla’s son] Tomer outside. Tomer, 17, was compelled at gunpoint to convince the neighbors to leave their protected spaces.
- “They took [the rest of] us from the house to our car, and drove. And then other terrorists opened fire on the car, because they thought it was a car of civilians who were fleeing. And they hit Dikla, and she was killed instantly,” [Dafna] said.
- When they arrived in Gaza, “lots of Gazans ran after us, wanted to come and beat us up, so [the captors] got us quickly into a house there and simply locked the door.”
- They then told Dafna to speak on the phone and agree to do “whatever they say,” or else they would kill her. “It’s scary when I know that whatever we do, they can kill us,” she said.
- “Ela didn’t really understand [what was going on], so she was, like, okay. She was afraid when at some point she saw a gun in the house, she started panicking, she thought they were planning to kill us,” Dafna said, adding that the captors had told her the gun was to protect them when they go outside.
- “I was afraid to go to sleep,” Dafna said. “I didn’t know what would happen in the morning, if I would wake up. I told myself all the time that there’s a chance that I’m going to sleep and won’t wake up, or that I’ll wake up but Ela won’t, or the other way around.”
- Dafna said her captors would constantly tell them that Israel wasn’t fighting for the hostages’ release, that Israelis didn’t care about them and preferred that they stay in Gaza, and that the abductees would only return in coffins. As a result, she said that during her time in Gaza, she didn’t believe her country was fighting to get her back home.
- Two weeks before their eventual release, the sisters were taken into Hamas’s underground tunnels, where they met five other female hostages who haven’t yet returned — Liri Albag, Naama Levy, Romy Gonen, Agam Berger and Emily Damari.“I think about them all the time,” she said. “When we were there it was really hard, so what’s happening now?… Now is a much harder situation than when we were still there.”
- She described difficult conditions in the tunnels, where they stayed in a tiny room with a very low ceiling that didn’t allow them to stand up, and were barely given food and water.
- Dafna said she doesn’t clearly remember the evening in which she and Ela were released. “I thought it wasn’t real, that maybe we were still in Gaza. That suddenly a Hamas member would emerge and take me, that we would be taken again,” she said, adding that only when she reunited with her mother did she grasp what had happened.
- “That day really changed my whole life, so it’s here — a reminder that everything can be gone in a second, that it’s impossible to know what will happen tomorrow, that if I want to do something, I should do it.”
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