Hila Rotem-Shoshani, who was a hostage in Gaza, recounted the conditions and experiences in Hamas captivity in an interview with The New York Times on Wednesday.
“I heard the voices of kids outside, and we were kept with other people living inside the house. I forced myself to drink the little water that they gave me,” were the first things she recounted. Her captors told her, “Don’t try to escape, they hate you. If you go outside, they will hurt you.”
Hila was kidnapped from her house in Kibbutz Be’eri, along with Emily Hand, who was staying at her house for a pajama party. When Hamas arrived and began raizing the Kibbutz, Hila and Emily, along with Raya Rotem, hid in the bomb shelter of her house. They were there for six hours. Eventually, the Hamas terrorists broke into the shelter with pistols and knives and took the three captive. They were forced into a car and had to witness burnt bodies and buildings along the way. One of the terrorists noticed Hila holding a doll, so he ripped it from her hands and threw it to the side of the road.
“The doll was in my hands the whole time; I didn’t even notice,” she said. “When you’re scared, you don’t pay attention.”
Hila is the youngest of the hostages who returned to give a full interview about the conditions of captivity. She says that the car ride from her home into the Gaza Strip was the first time she understood “just how close” the Strip was to the community she grew up in.
According to her, she was taken to a house along with two other hostages. In the beginning, they were kept in a room with an armed guard, but eventually were moved to the living room. “they understood that we wouldn’t escape,” she said. “Outside was also dangerous, why would we run?”
“The captors gave us little food, half of a pita, some halva, bean preserves, and a little bit of water.” Sometimes the captors would eat, and the hostages wouldn’t, she said, because there were “days that there simply wasn’t food, and they kept it to themselves.
‘We heard children’s voices’
She continued, “Sometimes we heard the voices of other children, and we understood that there were more people in the house.” Eventually, she and the other captives mustered up the courage to ask for permission to use the bathroom in the house, which is how Hila came to learn the word for it in Arabic- hammam.
She recalls one instance where an explosion caused the window of the room she was staying in to shatter. She also recalled several times they moved her in the middle of the night under the cover of darkness. They would tell her, “We’re moving you to a safer location,” she said. “However, we didnt know if that was the case or if we would be killed.”
They told the girls to remain silent and to play cards. “But how often can you play cards, every hour of every day?” she said.
A month and a half after she was taken hostage, the captors separated the young girls from Hila’s mother. “My mom began to worry that something wasn’t right when they didn’t take her,” she said. She then added, “And then, they simply took us away, and she remained there.”
The girls were released as part of the hostage deal at the end of November and returned to Israel. The separation of Hila and her mom disrupted the negotiation process, something that incited frustration across Israel. In the end, Hila’s mother was released after a few days – the day after Hila’s 13th birthday.
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