Sunday marked eight years that young Israelis Ziv Abud and Eliya Cohen have been together, but Cohen has been held hostage in Gaza since October 7, 2023.
Cohen is one of the 33 hostages slated to be released as part of the first phase of the hostage-ceasefire deal. Of those 33, 17 have yet to be released.
“I’m really, really tired from the fight, and I’m very sad because now I know the conditions that Eliya had—and still has—in the tunnels,” Abud said during a virtual MediaCentral discussion on Monday. “It breaks my heart to know that he was chained, all that happened to him in the tunnels, from people that were with him in the tunnels.”
From Abud’s understanding, about a week before Eli Sharabi and Or Levy were released from captivity, they were together with Cohen, and Alon Ohel was also part of this group of hostages.
Abud, Cohen, Abud’s nephew Amit Ben Avida, and Avida’s partner Karin Schwartzman attended the Nova festival together and, during the attack, fled to a shelter. That shelter was later renamed the “death shelter,” as many of those inside were murdered by Hamas terrorists, including Ben Avida and Schwartzman.
Abud survived by hiding under dead bodies for six hours, and Cohen, alongside Hersh Goldberg-Polin and Or Levy, was kidnapped to Gaza. That morning, she remembers being told by Cohen that his leg was wounded, and recently released hostages Sharabi and Levy have confirmed that he has a bullet in his foot.
“We heard that he was tortured, that he didn’t get medical care, and that they were starving, that they get maybe one pita bread in the day,” Abud said. “That he lost more than 20 kilos, that he was chained on his leg all the time in the tunnels from the seventh of October until now.”
Cohen cannot see sunlight, is disconnected from the world, is not aware Abud is alive, and does not know that his family is fighting for him, Abud said. Prior to the proof of life provided by released hostages, Cohen’s family only had a screenshot from October 7 that showed him in what appeared to be a hospital in Gaza.
“The moment that he was kidnapped, they put them on the truck, and then they shot inside the shelter,” she explained. “So if Eliya saw this situation, [it would be] crazy to know that someone survived this situation.”
According to Abud, Cohen passed along a message through freed hostages, wanting to share with his mother—who is religious—that he does kiddush before Shabbat and prays every morning.
Urgency to get all remaining hostages back
Dr. Einat Yehene, the senior rehabilitation psychologist at the Hostages Families Forum, spoke after Abud, and explained how after 494 days, all the hostages are humanitarian cases and all must be released immediately.
“I think that the images we saw on Saturday, [the hostages’] slimness, drastic loss of weight, coupled with the lost look in the hostages’ eyes, coupled with the confrontation to the cruelty of inhuman conditions by Hamas, and also having the stories about the losses—two out of the three hostages lost their loved ones from their nuclear family, Or Levy and Eli Sharabi—I think these three elements together really made an impact and evoked all kinds of traumatic memories in our collective psyche from dark times in Jewish history,” Yehene said.
Yehene also discussed the concept of ambiguous loss, which both hostages and their family members experience. Ambiguous loss is a condition where individuals sustain prolonged uncertainty about their loved ones’ fates, conditions, and whereabouts, she explained.
“As long as they don’t obtain clarity, finality, and closure—namely, to bring them all home, either for rehabilitation purposes or to be buried here—families are still staying in a frozen timeline,” Yehene said. “Their lives are being suspended, they cannot move on.”
“The ambiguous loss, as we learn now, also applies to the hostages in the tunnels because they are really in a huge ambiguity, not only about their releases but also in terms of what happened to their family members,” she added. “This is definitely a lot—too much—to assimilate upon release.”
The trauma of captivity can be divided into three layers, Yehene explained. The first layer is the abduction story, and the stories of the October 7 massacre, which Yehene said is exemplified by how Abud and Cohen were separated.
“Secondly is the prolonged captivity period and the inhumane conditions and tortures, and the psychological terror the hostages endure from their captors, [and] the inhumane environment in which they are being held,” she said. “The third part that adds on to the trauma is also the release, the ceremonies in which they are being released.”
With 76 hostages still in captivity, the rehabilitation process for those released is further impeded, Yehene said.
“We all need—the families and the entire public—the clarity, the finality, and the closure to have all of them, the dead and the live hostages, here in Israel,” she concluded. “Otherwise we cannot even progress to the healing process.”
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