“On the 7th of October [de 2023]I was kidnapped with four other members of my family and a dog. They took us from the safe room of kibbutz Nir Yitzhak in a very brutal way. They shot at us, but didn’t hit us. They were very aggressive”, says Louis Har, a former Hamas hostage, freed by the Israeli military in an operation on February 12 [de 2024] in Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip.
And he continues, about the day of the kidnapping, when in addition to taking 230 hostages, Hamas massacred 1,200 Israelis: “They took us to Gaza, to the tunnel area. We walked for several hours inside the tunnel. They took us upstairs and put us in an apartment on the second floor of a building. We were then transferred to another apartment, where we stayed until the end. At the beginning there was enough food, there seemed to be no shortage of supply, but over time it became smaller, the portions were smaller and smaller. After 53 days, the three women were taken and released under the November agreement. Fernando, my friend, and I stayed there for 129 days. The army freed us in one of the rare successful hostage rescue operations.”
Har, born in Argentina and living in Israel since 1971, tells his story in Hebrew and is translated by Daniel Shek, former Israeli ambassador to France, now retired, one of the volunteers at the Hostage Families Forum. We are on the sixth floor of a building in the center of Tel Aviv that serves as headquarters for those trying everything to ensure that the hostages in Gaza are not forgotten. Initially there were more than 230. [Há ainda 48 sequestrados, dos quais apenas 20 estarão vivos, e com fortes hipóteses de serem agora libertados por causa da nova negociação entre Israel e o Hamas]. Nearby is the so-called Hostage Square, next to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, where there are many artistic evocations, including a replica of a section of the Hamas tunnel, intended to convey the feeling of suffocation of those trapped underground.