Louis Har, one of the two hostages who was rescued by the IDF from Gaza last month, spoke to the Daily Mail about the harrowing experiences he endured.
Har was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Yitzchak on October 7th together with four family members.
He described their journey at gunpoint into Gaza in a white pick-up truck as they passed hordes of “armed youths rushing into Israel looting everything they saw as bodies lay scattered by the roadside.”
“It was like a movie. Their barbarism… They didn’t consider us at all, as if we were animals or dogs. They just trampled all over us freely. Real barbarians. As if we weren’t human beings. A crowd of youths with a large cleaver threatened to slaughter us. They were going to lynch us, then the car started driving at high speed.”
When they arrived in Gaza, the five of them were taken into a tunnel with “terrorists in front, in the middle, and at the back, with guns.”
They were forced to walk barefoot, at times crawling on their hands and knees, through the tunnel network for three hours. At one point another group of terrorists started chasing them, shouting ‘Jews! Jews!’ Har, who was born in Argentina, quickly shouted back: ‘Argentinians, Argentinians! Messi, Messi!’
They eventually emerged from the tunnel and after two days in one building they were kept in a windowless room for 50 days “under the gaze of cruel armed guards who taunted them.” They were fed scraps of pita bread.
“There was constant psychological warfare. They told us it wasn’t advisable to wander outside, that they would beat us to death.”
‘They really made sure to tell us every failure of the IDF or every time soldiers were killed. They told us we had nowhere to return to, that Kibbutz Nir Yitzchak no longer existed.”
“They kept telling us not to speak loudly because the UAV’s, if they heard us, would pass the information to Netanyahu and Netanyahu would send planes to bomb us because he doesn’t want any deal, he wants to kill us. They kept repeating this to us, every day. Eventually it gets into your head.”
After 52 days, Har’s three female relatives, two women and a 17-year-old, were released and it was just him and his brother-in-law Fernando for the next three months. “It was during these long, monotonous days alone with Fernando that Mr Har’s dreams of his 10 grandchildren, aged between one and 17, become so vivid.”
“‘I felt their hug in my body, the warmth of their bodies,’ he said. ‘I felt them all the time. Many times it was like I was talking to them, a feeling of closeness.’
“Often, they were so real he would awake in tears, but quickly wipe his eyes so the guards, and his fellow hostage, would not see. ‘Even the day before our release, I really felt one of the kids hugging me,’ he said.”
Har had a dream after 120 days that he was rescued by IDF commando soldiers. His dream came true just days later.
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)
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and the US, the UN, the UK don’t care about how Hamas treats the Jews, but we Jews have to obey international law, give them food, humanitarian aid
BUT the world is silent about the same for the hostages…..