Nili Margalit, who was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7th and released in November, told the French Le Point magazine that she was abducted by armed Gazan civilians who also set fire to her house.

Speaking in an interview with the French outlet while on a tour of Europe this week to raise awarness about the hostages, Margalit described how she was hiding in her safe room on Kibbutz Nir Oz when Gazan civilians reached her home at 9 a.m. They turned her house upside down, set it on fire, and put her in a golf cart covered with a white sheet. She was then driven to Gaza surrounded by jubilant Gazan civilians armed with Kalashnikovs.

At the border, she was transferred to a car and taken to Khan Younis, as Gazan civilians jeered at her on the streets. “They negotiated with Hamas to sell me,” she said. “When they were paid, I was taken straight into a tunnel. I saw elderly people, children taken hostage.”

She was initially held in a “reception room” in a tunnel with about 30 other hostages, many of them from Nir Oz. She said that the male hostages were suffering from swollen faces and inured legs from being dragged on motorbikes.

Later, she was moved to a small room with about 12 other people, where they were heavily guarded and given tiny portions of rice and bread.

Margalit is an emergency room nurse by profession and she used her time in captivity to tend to the other hostages, many of them elderly and suffering from the lack of their daily medications, oxygen, glasses, and hearing aids. She said that the days in captivity were long and the captives sometimes argued among themselves. “There were shouting matches, crying, laughing, it’s normal when you put ten people in the same room, we’re human! But we always supported each other.”

“At first, I told myself it would only last two days. Then I understood that Israel would never pay for so many hostages. This depressed some of us. We had to hold on psychologically.”

It was only after she was released on November 30 that Margalit slowly became aware of the magnitude of the tragedy that Israel suffered on October 7th. And only a day after she was released, she received personal bad news – the IDF confirmed that Hamas murdered her father Eliyahu Margalit, H’yd, on October 7th and abducted his body.

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)