The tiredness in the eyes, but the smile on the lips. The four Israeli hostages freed in an army raid in the center of the Gaza Strip, disembarked by military helicopter and escorted to hospital in Tel Aviv, have reunited with their families after 246 days in the hands of Hamas. The doctors found them exhausted, but in general good health.
Video Gaza, 4 hostages freed: Noa Argamani hugs her father again
On board a minibus, Noa Argamani, 26 years old under kidnapping, looks her father in the eyes before abandoning herself on his safe shoulder, then the usual photos that portray them both smiling. The young girl was the first to receive the phone call from Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog.
“Not for a minute did we stop thinking about you and we never gave up,” the prime minister told her. It would have been impossible, moreover, to forget Noa’s desperate scream, “don’t kill me!”, while the terrorists took her away from the Nova Festival on board a motorbike: the video of her kidnapping became one of the symbols of the horror of October 7. Her boyfriend Avinatan Or, also kidnapped, is still a prisoner of Hamas. To Netanyahu, the young woman of Chinese origin, a student at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev, immediately confided: “I am very excited, I haven’t spoken Hebrew for so long…”. Her mother Liora, seriously ill with cancer, had launched a desperate appeal, including to American President Joe Biden, to be able to hug her again before dying.
Video Noa’s nightmare, kidnapped with her boyfriend at a rave in the desert in southern Israel
All four were at the Reim music festival: Andrey Kozlov, a 27-year-old Russian citizen who immigrated to Israel just a year and a half ago without his family, was working as security at the rave. The Israeli consulate in St. Petersburg immediately contacted his parents to assist them in traveling to Tel Aviv, where they will arrive tomorrow morning.
The youngest among the freed hostages is Almog Meir Jan, twenty-two years old from Or Yehuda. He was supposed to start working at a major high-tech company on October 8, the day after the massacre. Those who know him describe him as a boy who is “always kind and helpful to everyone”.
The oldest is Shlomi Ziv, 41, who like Andrey worked as security at the Nova Festival. In his first words to his wife Miren, he asked to see Yanai and Aviv Eliyahu, two brothers who were with him at the rave: the first survived, the second was killed by terrorists. “We’ll talk about it later,” his wife replied. Now is the time for joy.
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