I want the world to know what Hamas did to me in the tunnels

They were locked deep down in the tunnels for days. The terrorists went up because there was not enough oxygen to breathe. There was never enough water. They slept on filthy mattresses, in their filthy clothes. They were tortured and starved, sometimes given half a pita or two dates. The terrorists would eat and drink in front of them. “Once they ate a piece of fish and we had two teaspoons from it. It was delicious. Someone who knows how to cook, one of the mothers of the terrorists, I guess. It was the best thing I ate there,” says Aviva Siegel, who spent 51 days held captive by Hamas underground in tunnels and in terrorist homes in 13 locations in Gaza.

Aviva says she doesn’t believe in God. One year ago, on October 7, Hamas terrorists savagely dragged her and her husband, Keith, in their pyjamas, from their safe room on the Kfar Aza kibbutz. As their community was being riddled by machine-gun bullets and grenades, they were driven at gunpoint through the fence to Gaza in Keith’s company car. Amid gleeful screams of, “Allah Hu Akbar!“ from the Gazans, Aviva and Keith were pushed down into a tunnel. Sure that her son, Shai Siegel, 41, was dead and her country destroyed, Aviva turned to a popular Israeli song as a prayer. Only when she was singing Amen For My Children in her heart could she let herself think about Shai and her family back home.

Sixty-two people were killed on Oct. 7, 2023, in Kfar Aza, a kibbutz community five kilometres east of the Gaza border, when about 75 Hamas terrorists attacked residents hiding from rockets in their safe rooms. Aviva, 62, and her husband, Keith Siegel, 65, an American-Israeli from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, had been living and working there for 43 years — she, a preschool teacher, he, a pharmaceutical representative.

Keith is still in Gaza, along with Aviva’s former fellow captives, a number of young women over the age of 14. Aviva never refers to them by name or specific age, but only as “the girls.”

“They dressed the girls up like dolls. If you were the mother of one of the girls, you would have died. One of the girls, she’s gorgeous the way she looks, she’s beautiful, and they brought her clothes that hardly fit her, maybe Size 4 for a little girl, with her stomach out and you could see parts of her body and it was tight on her, and she came out of the shower and she showed him that she can’t even bend her knee. She couldn’t breathe, the poor thing,” says Aviva.

“Another day, one girl got called to go out of the room. She said, ‘I am scared.’ They pushed her and pressed a pistol between her eyes and the terrorist said, ‘We will kill you.’ They took her to the next room in a blanket where four terrorists hit her with a stick and the butts of their rifles. I put my fingers in my ears but I could still hear the sounds. She came back reddened all over and I asked her why she didn’t scream. She said, ‘I didn’t want to give them that pleasure.’ They hit the girls to pieces. They looked at the girls’ bodies. My heart is broken in pieces.”

Nineteen hostages were taken from Kfar Aza. Eleven, including Aviva, were released in the first exchange deal late last November, brokered by Qatar and the U.S. government. Two men from Kfar Aza were mistakenly killed by the IDF after they escaped captivity in Gaza. The rest are still there. As of Sept. 1, 101 hostages remained in Gaza. Many are feared dead.

It wasn’t until Aviva returned to Israel that she found out her son Shai was alive. The reunion was bittersweet. “He has no house, his best friends were killed, he lost his job. He has a restaurant in Sderot he has not opened. He’s not working since then,” she says.

Aviva is probably the most outspoken of the returned captives from Gaza. Perhaps it’s her red-headed genes or her native South African English mother tongue that gives her the confidence, but she is now mostly either in the centre of Tel Aviv or flying around the world addressing diplomats, media and faith groups, all eager to hear her story.

Her family immigrated from South Africa to Kibbutz Tsor’a in Israel when she was nine. Aviva fell in love with Keith at 19, when she saw an American volunteer on nearby Kibbutz Gezer, driving a tractor in the cotton fields. They married young, raised four kids, and now have five grandchildren.

We are meeting in a loaned apartment that Aviva stays in when she comes to Tel Aviv so she can be close to her support network, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum at Hostages Square, a plaza joining the Tel Aviv Museum of Art to Beit Ariela, Tel Aviv’s central library. The open outdoor space and library foyer is now base camp for returned hostages and the families of those still missing. Plastered with flyers, meeting tents and exhibits, this is where the loved ones of people held in captivity get meals, hugs and financial support. Aviva stays in Tel Aviv most days where, with her daughters, she works day and night to have Keith released.

Aviva hasn’t been back to her house at Kfar Aza. There are bullet holes and shattered pieces of things the terrorists destroyed. They looted what they could. Her wedding album was salvaged by her daughter, along with some small personal items. Those taken hostage didn’t have their houses burned, says Hagar Yechieli, 53, the kibbutz spokesperson. “They left these houses but burned the ones with people still inside hoping they’d run out so they could kidnap them.”

Kfar Aza is a kibbutz of about 700 people. A typical kibbutz looks like a retirement community or a ski village. People live in modest bungalows, often attached. There are kindergartens, a medical clinic, a dining hall, agricultural activities and farming equipment. Everyone is within walking distance. Dogs and children run wild. Aviva, as a senior member in the nursery, soothed, cuddled and changed the diapers of many of those killed when they were babies. Some members have returned to the kibbutz, but it still needs to be rebuilt.

Aviva’s affairs, including every minute of interviews with her family, are closely managed by representatives from the Hostages and Missing Families Forum. This is a non-profit with hundreds of employees and thousands of volunteers that support families of the hostages around the world.

A large and ferocious-sounding black dog greets us at the 4th-floor apartment. He is assured by Aviva we are friends, finding a place at my feet. Aviva is wearing the same T-shirt that she wears in all her media appearances: It has a photo of Keith, with the words Bring Keith Home Now. She worries about the heat outside and offers drinks. Coffee? We settle on water. The kibbutz dog drinks from our glass. Aviva mutters that her daughter’s dog may be untrainable.

She picks her favourite chair, ready to tell her story of captivity, one she’s told hundreds of times during the daytime and revisits in her nightmares. She is composed, articulate and focused on a singular goal: Keith, the girls and all the hostages cannot be in Gaza a minute longer. She knows why. She was there.

“I was kidnapped in my pyjamas and taken underground to the tunnels in the Gaza Strip. It started on the 7th of October in the morning. We ran to our shelter after hearing the first alarm. After two alarms we went out and peeked through the windows and saw missiles on their way to Beersheba and Tel Aviv. After the third alarm, we said to ourselves, ‘Something different is happening here.’ We stayed in the shelter for four hours with Keith holding my hand. He told me not to worry. That we are safe.

“But on the WhatsApp group of the kibbutz, people were reporting that they heard shooting on the kibbutz. Then someone said that there were terrorists. Terrorists? I said to myself, ‘That’s hard to believe.’ Then someone wrote that Ofir was killed. I still thought, ‘Really? People are being killed?’

“My husband walked out of the safe room, locked the windows and the doors. He told me our son Shai heard Arabic outside his house. Then we heard Arabic. Then steps just next to the door.

“They opened our safe room with a click and about 15 men, brutal terrorists, are inside. Keith had his hands on his head, his head on his knees, and this might have saved him. They screamed, ‘Where is balad?’ Balad means child in Arabic. I screamed back there is no balad! They saw the crib of my grandchild. And continued looking for the balad in all the cupboards, under the beds.

“They pulled us outside through the window, and while they were doing that, ruined everything that they could see with their machine-guns and hands. We started walking with them and Keith said we need to run away. Keith said, ‘If we don’t, they will take us to Gaza,’ and I said, ‘OK, they will take us to Gaza.’ I was completely out of it.

“They pulled my hair. Keith fell and broke his ribs, a bullet hit his head. He was bleeding all over his pants. We were taken straight down to an underground tunnel and 10 minutes later someone from Kfar Aza came down with us covered in blood. They’d shot his window and he’d walked across glass.

“Another ten minutes later, a mother came with three kids, Chen Goldstein from Kfar Aza. They told us all to sit down but she couldn’t. She just kept walking in circles. ‘They killed my daughter,’ she kept repeating. Chen’s husband took a stick to defend them against the terrorists and they shot him in front of the kids. Their daughter fainted and the terrorists told Chen to wake her up. She tried, but she wouldn’t wake.

“Chen said, ‘They shot her,’ and I tried to comfort her and calm her down. ‘Don’t decide she’s dead,’ I said. Maybe she’s going to be OK. ‘No,’ said Chen. She said they shot her in the face.” Yam Goldstein-Almog, 20, died in front of her siblings and mother. Chen said she saw the exit wound in the back of her daughter’s head and witnessed Yam gasping for her last breaths through a hole in her cheek.

“There was also a boy with us from our kibbutz and he said that a dog was killed. The dog’s blood was all over his body. I was sure they shot my son Shai’s dog, Shuvit, and that my son was killed. Luckily, I had Keith who said everything is going to be OK.”

Just after arriving at the Gaza tunnels, Aviva and Keith were separated from the others and locked in a tunnel with another young woman she refuses to identify. This woman is still captive. They were left alone in the tunnels, sometimes for more than two days, with no food. “I was sure I was going to die down there. I just hoped I would die before Keith,” says Aviva.

After the tunnels, they were brought aboveground to a terrorist’s home, where Aviva shared a room with Keith and three girls in a house.

“I want everyone to close their eyes and imagine they have a daughter that is young, that they love and want to protect, to give them the best of everything. I was excited to meet my daughter’s first boyfriend and I loved being the mother of daughters. And I am telling you that, thinking about mothers having daughters, I feel so lucky that I don’t have a daughter in Gaza. Because if I did, I don’t know how I would manage, how I would be able to continue getting up in the morning. What the girls I was with went through is too much.

“I won’t say names or ages to protect their privacy but there were three girls, and they are young. At the beginning, we were with one girl and she and the others were asked to have a shower with the door open in front of the terrorists and I remember them coming out of there in complete shock. Maybe they didn’t want to see my body because I am old. They waited for the girls to go in and watched them. When they came out, they said that they tried to hide their bodies but it was difficult. These are girls that, I can tell you, have never shown their bodies to anybody.

“There was a terrible story about one of the girls that something really bad happened (to) when she wasn’t with us. And what she and another girl went through — I can’t even say it with words because they won’t come out of my mouth — but it’s one of the worst things anyone can go through. It was sexual. All I can tell you is that they were much more than raped. The two of them really went through hell. And I know of girls that came back to Israel who were raped. That I know. And they were young.”

She refuses to talk in detail about the horrors the young women she was with experienced.

It took the United Nations five months to issue a statement, but on March 4, 2024, a special team on sexual violence in conflict found reasonable grounds to conclude that conflict-related sexual violence occurred in multiple locations in southern Israel on October 7. At Kfar Aza, the UN team reported: “In this kibbutz, similarly to other locations, female victims were found fully or partially naked to the waist down with their hands tied behind their backs and shot.”

The UN also reported on what they learned from those released from Gaza: “With respect to hostages, the mission team found clear and convincing information that some have been subjected to various forms of conflict-related sexual violence, including rape and sexualized torture and sexualized cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and it also has reasonable grounds to believe that such violence may be ongoing.”

“This is more than evil. Much more than evil. We need to create a new word for what happened here,” says Aviva.

“I was told by Keith that he told the girls we were with not to tell me about such things because he didn’t want me to hear anything. I know they would speak often with Keith when we could talk. He would really help them.”

Aviva got permission and met with the girls’ families, sharing stories about her time with them. “They were more than grateful. I don’t mention the names of the girls because I want to protect them,” she says.

“One of the girls was singing the song she taught me, Amen For My Children, in the rare moments when we could talk or whisper. I made up my own version of this song and only allowed myself to think of Shai when I was singing it, because I was sure he was dead,” says Aviva, singing the chorus out loud. “It’s a song about protecting your kids. I sang it all the time in my heart when I was there and could only think of him during that song. Otherwise, it was just too heartbreaking for me. It became a prayer for me and my kids and my grandchildren. I still sing it.

“Once a terrorist from the other room heard the girl singing this song and he asked her to sing a couple of other songs to record her. And they recorded her singing. I was in tears. She changed the words of one song so that if her parents would hear her singing it, they’d know it was her. I couldn’t handle it. I was just destroyed.”

Aviva breaks down crying. “It’s OK, I am used to crying. Don’t worry, it’s part of my life. I cry every day.”

There were no pens or paper for the hostages to pass time, document the horrors or plant clues for future rescuers. The choices of what one does all day in captivity were simple: You could lie on the dirty mattress on your stomach or on your back. “One of the girls came back excited about standing on the toilet and looking outside to the street. And I remember telling her I would be afraid to do something like that. Someone could see her and then come and kill us. I was scared all the time.”

At one point they had a pack of cards. “We would spend our time playing a game called Cheat. I didn’t know the game before. If it was dark, we’d play War. If it was too dark, the girls would play the cards for me and Keith.”

One of the terrorists kept his kids in the home: “When we came in, we heard a child crying and I asked him if these were his kids and he said, ‘No’. But the next day he brought them out of the room to walk around. They called him father. So we knew they belonged to him. They used to lie to us all the time. About everything. It’s ridiculous to say they aren’t his children and they call him father. They said we will never be able to go back to Israel. That Israel was destroyed. That Kfar Aza didn’t exist. And it’s strange, because I don’t know how I believed them, but I did.

“The men who held us gave us their names but not their real names. And then we realized that they call each other different names. In some of the places we got Arabic names. They called me Ruth.

“We were moved 13 times, sometimes 40 metres underground. The terrorists went up because there was no oxygen and we were sure we were going to die. We had to find strategies to figure out how to keep breathing.”

Keith has tools that his family hopes will help him stay alive — meditation and vipassana, a form of meditation that Keith experienced twice at a 10-day, non-verbal, mind-body seminar at a Sea of Galilee centre. “Keith said that vipassana is not only about keeping quiet. You learn about yourself on the inside. I told him that there is no way I will ever be able to keep quiet for more than a couple of minutes. And then I was in Gaza where I had to be quiet for days and days, where we weren’t even allowed to whisper. We just sat down or lied down on a filthy mattress not saying a word, communicating with each other’s eyes, unless they locked us in a small room and we could talk a little bit. But I was scared every time they locked us up because I had an infection in my stomach and I needed to run to the bathroom.

“After a couple of weeks, I was brought a terrorist’s mother’s clothes. I didn’t have a bra but got some pants and a shirt with Facebook on it. It’s disgusting to be with the same panties for 51 days. And the girls, too. They took Keith’s underwear and brought him underwear that was too small for him. He didn’t want to deal with it, so he was without. He just had pants on.

“They told Keith to shave his private parts and armpits, because they said that’s what the religious Muslim men do every two weeks. So they made Keith shave his intimate place. They shaved his face like an Arab, leaving a bit of hair on his chin. They made him wear an Arab garment, a jalabiya in light blue.

There were no flush toilets or menstrual pads for the young women: “If we were in the tunnels, we had toilets that didn’t have any water in them and they would fill up to the top, then flushed with a bucket of water from aboveground. And the terrorists would do No. 2 in one of their houses and asked me to come with the bucket of water to flush it down. And I nearly (vomited) every time. It was so disgusting. They used to do it to us on purpose.

“I brushed my teeth a total of four times. The smells that came from us were disgusting. You don’t even think about it. I didn’t wash my hands, yet I had diarrhea. You get used to it. You know it’s strange that I am telling you about it this way, but not washing our hands and smelling is nothing compared to what we went through.

“Every day, every minute, I can tell you, I felt death above my head. I wanted them to kill me. They played games with us in any way they wanted.”

Aviva estimates being handled by about 45 terrorists in Gaza: “I met the wife of a terrorist who had three children. She was asked to put the pin on my head covering so it would look good on me when they moved us around outside. I looked her in the eyes when she was doing it. I wanted her to look at me in the eyes. I wanted her to see the human. But in my heart I could not believe that she would allow her husband to treat us like that. If she had a choice? I am sure that she didn’t. But I don’t know what she felt. I don’t know what these women feel about their husbands that beat children and are so brutal.”

Spending time with the girls was a small pleasure, but in the last two weeks before her release, Keith and Aviva were separated from them and were alone together. “The girls are still there. Keith is still there. They are tossed around and thrown onto filthy mattresses like they are rugs.

“Imagine your girl lying on a filthy, dirty mattress for more than a year with filthy, dirty clothes because you don’t shower or don’t change. But just imagine in your mind what goes on. One of the girls might be thinking, ‘Am I going to be raped again? Am I going to be raped next to the people next to me? Will they let me scream? Will my friend be the next one?’ I wonder if they are torturing Keith in front of the girls? Will Keith see them raped?”

When Hamas asked him, Keith denied he was American so that Aviva could be rescued first. His plan worked. “They drove us in a car to a house in an area that was bombed. ‘Good,’ I thought, ‘it will be quiet here.’ They took us to a different room from Keith. After 10 minutes, they said, ‘You, tomorrow, Israel. Come.’ And I said, ‘Me and Keith’. I begged him, I pushed him and said, I am going to Keith.’ I went to him and told Keith that I am going to Israel and that he must be strong. He didn’t say a word. We were separated, never knowing if I will see Keith again.

“They took me alone with a terrorist in a car and I thought that maybe this will be my last day. I arrived at a house with a Thai guy who was shaking and scared. I hugged him. The next day, they put us in a car with an eight-year-old and her 15-year-old sister (Ella and Dafna Elyakim), who told me she will never forget her sister’s screams when they severed (Ella’s) finger. When they arrived back to Israel, they learned their father (Noam Elyakim) was killed.” The terrorists livestreamed the Elyakim family attack on Facebook.

“When I returned, I promised myself I am going to be strong for my family. For my grandchildren, for my children, and I will be the strongest that I can to bring Keith back home. I was a preschool teacher for 43 years. I loved it. If I could, I would go back now. I miss my job. I miss my life. I miss everything that was before the 7th. I am like a dead person walking around that’s still in Gaza.

“Is there humanity in Gaza? No. If they were human for a second, they were disgusting two seconds later, so that doesn’t mean they were human. They were just the most brutal people, I wouldn’t even call them people,” Aviva says.

Keith’s children, Aviva, and his older brother, Lee Siegel, and his wife, Sheli, are leading the fight for Keith’s release. Keith and Lee are from a Zionist Jewish family of four kids from North Carolina.

“Back then, it was a state of 5,000 Jews among a population of one million,” says Lee. Their dad, Earl, was accepted to medical school through the U.S. Navy and shipped to Hamilton Field, an Air Force base in Northern California, where Keith was born. Their mom, Gladys, was a nurse. Earl later studied public health in Berkeley because “he was bored in pediatrics,” says Lee.

The family eventually settled in Chapel Hill, and became part of a Reform-Conservative Jewish community there. This is the same town where James Taylor grew up. He’s Keith’s favourite musician. Lee went to high school with one of the Taylor brothers. Both Siegel brothers immigrated to Israel, Lee first, and joined a kibbutz after spending summers and a sabbatical in Israel with their parents. Keith moved from the United States to Israel in 1980.

Lee says that Keith is a “very gentle person, very in tune with his body, with what goes in and out. He’s very much into meditation. He’s a vegetarian.”

Says Lee, “Most of the North Americans in the ‘70s were looking for community and going back to the land. We were liberal and not so constrained to the common order, but no, we were not hippies.”

A Telegram video Lee saw on October 7 was incongruous to any reality the Siegel family has ever known: “I could see them clearly in Keith’s car as though they were posing. We also saw videos of terrorists trying to run a woman over in the fields, so yeah, it was helpful to see them alive.”

A week later, the police asked for DNA samples: “Me for Keith, Aviva’s twin sister for Aviva — clothing, hair, a swab from my mouth. The police had to start somewhere. There were so many missing and scattered bodies in the fields. They were building a database. That was pretty eerie.”

Lee looks shell-shocked over his brother’s captivity. But he’s seen signs of life, so he’s hopeful: A video was released in April showing Keith talking about the last Passover holiday, loving his family. Keith breaks down crying in the video. Lee says there is nothing wrong with crying. He is also worried about Aviva. “She doesn’t have a full appreciation of her fragility. She says she will have time to deal with herself when Keith comes home.”

Aviva and Keith’s daughter, Elan Tiv, 33, hasn’t worked since the attack. She spends her days supporting her mother and dad’s release: “My dad is a good listener, with a simple and genuine outlook. He is optimistic with a good heart and that’s what he is to me.”

Tiv leads visualizations of hope with her family and prayer groups to make sure Keith has an aura of protection around him. One of the songs she thinks about and visualizes for the family is Carolina In My Mind by James Taylor. She started when both her parents were in Gaza. That’s where they all imagine themselves now, “to be far from Israel, far from Gaza,” says Tiv.

“When my mom came back from Gaza, to our surprise, she said that she and my dad were singing the same song and dreaming the same dream, of being together hiking the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina,” says Tiv. Keith’s mom, Gladys, 97, is still in North Carolina, in an assisted-living facility.

Aviva is incredulous that people still deny her experiences on social media and in worldwide protests: “I was there. I was starved. I was tortured. I had to hide my tears. There was no oxygen in the tunnels and we were wondering who would die first. Why is there this denial? I think first of all, it’s because we are Jews, and secondly, because some of the stories are very hard. I know of hostages that are locked up with chains, people who are locked in cages.

“After the Holocaust, the Jews said never again, but it happened again. Keith is still there, the girls are still there.”

Aviva still doesn’t believe in God.