Freed hostage says she feared rape, torture in Gaza

‘During Every transition, I wondered if they were going to kill us.’

By Vered Weiss, World Israel News

Agam Almog-Goldstein (17), who, along with her mother Chen and her brothers Gal (11) and Tal (9), was released from Gaza on November 26, described the horrors of her captivity at the hands of Hamas in an interview on Army radio on Thursday.

Agam described being taken by Hamas terrorists from her home in Kfar Aza, and she communicated her fears directly to her mother, Chen.

“I simply told my mom, ‘They are going to torture me. They are going to rape me,'” Agam recounted.

She added, “I remember telling my mom that they were going to do something to me, and that was the moment I realized that they were really taking me out of the house.”

In addition to kidnapping her, Hamas terrorists also took her mother and her two younger brothers, Gal and Tal.

Agam’s father, Nadav, who was recovering from surgery and had mobility issues, was in the safe room with Yam, the couple’s eldest daughter and both were killed on October 7th.

The family learned of Nadav and Yam’s death while they were in Gaza through the radio.

“We knew there was no chance for Yam, but we had hope that we would return and father would be waiting for us, that we would see him in a wheelchair. What we heard on the radio shattered that hope for us.”

Unlike many of the other hostages, Agam wasn’t separated from the rest of her family, and often she and her mother shared a silent language that conveyed their feelings in captivity that couldn’t be described in ordinary words.

Agam said, “Words are too small compared to what the body feels. So that’s how it was. We looked and understood, as cliché as it may sound. We just had to look at each other and feel that we are in the same boat, feeling the same thing, and we couldn’t talk about it because there are no words to describe it.”

She described the ways in which her captivity in Gaza has changed her life, “It changed many things for the worse and took away a sense of security from me, instilling a lot of fear, anxiety, confusion, and helplessness.”

Agam said that from the beginning of the captivity, the uncertainty about the terrorist’s next move or whether or not they would kill them caused her intense anxiety, especially when the terrorists moved the hostages from place to place.

“The transitions between people there, from place to place (were hardest).”

Agam recounts, “Every transition I wondered if they were going to kill us.”

After the initial fear of the terrorists, Agam confessed she was frightened of being killed in the IDF airstrikes.

“With all the difficulty in saying it, I was most afraid of the airstrikes every night.”

She continued, “I worried about what they (the terrorists) would do to them (Gal and Tal) if my mother and I were harmed by the airstrikes.”

“I kept saying to myself all the time – what, won’t I reach my 18th birthday? At least give me until 18. And Gal and Tal, I thought, they’re so young.”