‘God was with me’ – First hostage rescued by IDF speaks out

Ori Megidish told her interviewer that, while enduring sexual harassment and other horrors, she received signs from God that she would survive.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Ori Megidish, the first hostage to be rescued by IDF forces from the Gaza Strip, spoke out Wednesday for the first time in an extensive interview on Channel 12 about her experiences — from capture to captivity to liberation 23 days after the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion.

An IDF observer at the Nahal Oz base, she ran with several others to a shelter when Hamas launched its attack with intensive rocket fire. She was taken captive along with two other observers, Noa Marciano and Naama Levy.

Marciano was murdered the next month by a doctor in Shifa Hospital.

Levy was freed after 477 days in the second hostage deal with Hamas, along with the other four remaining IDF observers abducted from Nahal Oz.

Megidish painfully described how one of her captors, “the boss,” looked at her “differently than a normal person would… touch places that shouldn’t be touched,” although she tried to protest.

“When I arrived, I didn’t think about it at all,” she said, “and only after a few months did I accept that it was sexual harassment and I went through it, and it’s not shameful that I went through it.”

“I know it’s not my fault and it’s not like I could have prevented it,” she continued, “but in the end, there’s always … what if I had done this, and what if I had done that? And God knows what would have happened if we had been in this apartment longer.”

Three weeks into her captivity, the ceiling collapsed from an IDF airstrike, there was a fire, and another hostage, whom she didn’t name, was killed.

The “boss” took her to a hospital. A doctor stitched up her head and face – without using an anaesthetic.

“It was an indescribable pain,” Megidish said. “They told me to be quiet and not to scream.”

She was then taken to a different apartment, where her captors warned her that if any IDF soldiers appeared, they would kill her first.

Although this frightened her immensely, she said that from the beginning, “I had faith that God was by my side, watching over me, and would get me out of there.”

She frequently asked for signals from heaven that she would be free one day, and, she said, she received positive replies.

“I would ask a question, like if I’m supposed to get out of here, let there be a boom. And then there was a boom. There were all sorts of signs,” she said.

At one point, she asked God if she could see a butterfly, and “suddenly, one of the captors pulled out a toy shaped like a very colorful butterfly. I started smiling, even though I had stitches in my face — I felt He was with me.”

She was asleep at 2 a.m. when gunfire sounded nearby and an Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) undercover unit burst into the apartment and killed her two captors.

She ran to hide behind a refrigerator, and although confused, she “felt” it was a rescue, Megidish said, and she shouted out in Hebrew.

Doubts crept in when she saw a man dressed like a Palestinian standing before her, but she ran out with him, even though, she said, she thought that “it could have been another kidnapping, at that level.”

It was a relief to hear him speaking Hebrew in the car as they sped away, checking her to see if she had been injured.

“I remember exchanging glances with him, and I saw how excited he was,” she said.

In December 2024, the IDF released a video of the rescue vehicle making its way out of the Shaati refugee camp in Gaza City, with an audio recording of her mother repeatedly reassuring her that she was “in good hands,” that she was being brought home, and that she had been incredibly brave.

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