Hila finds it very strange to see posters with her photo on the walls of Tel Aviv: “But how long have I been there?” she asks her uncle Yair Rotem. “Immediately after October 7th, we filled the cities, televisions and social media with your faces. “We only had one goal: to bring you home,” he replies. During their fifty days as hostages in Gaza, Hila, 13, her mother Raya, 54, and her friend Emily Hand, 9, had no idea what was happening in the country. “They had no news. They knew they had been kidnapped by Hamas, but that was all. Out of nowhere they ask me questions: “Is the neighbor alive?”, “What happened to his classmate?”, “And in our house?”. I try to tell everything with great caution and follow the advice of psychologists,” he explains to CorriereRotem. He replies from a hotel in Tel Aviv: “They moved us here since yesterday. In the days after the liberation we were in Sheba Hospital.
The story of Raya and Hila is a story within a story. We have already written and read their names because the little girl was released on November 25th without her mother, who came to her just five days later: “There were moments of fear. What would we have done if my sister hadn’t come back?” he continues. On October 7, the mother, daughter and friend were captured in the safe room of their home on Kibbutz Be’eri and taken to the Strip in a pickup truck. The final message was sent to him, his brother and his uncle. It was 12:05 that Saturday morning: “They have kidnapped us, they are taking us with them.” Then silence. With humility and sensitivity, Rotem shares Raya’s statement: “I never ask her questions; when she feels like it, she tells the story.” He explained to me that they had always been together. On the first day they were taken to one apartment and at night to another. He doesn’t know where they were because all movements were in the dark. They covered their eyes with cloths.
They were locked in a room with other hostages. There were mattresses on the floor. All they could do was go to the toilet. The militiamen strolled through the halls of the house: “Some were friendlier than others. But no matter, I can’t stand the narrative of good or bad terrorists: they killed and kidnapped,” Rotem says.
They lived under precarious hygienic conditions. There was no water, “so all physical needs remained there.” My sister says that every four or five days they would bring a full bucket and pour it into the toilet, and one of the hostages would take turns cleaning it. To wash themselves, they used wet towels in a pan heated with a small gas stove. “You could hear the bombs falling nearby. One day someone fell right next to them and the windows blew out. They were afraid of dying in an attack or at the hands of militia members. They were always afraid. When a rocket hit, the terrorists said, “Do you know that Netanyahu is killing our children?”
Some days they ate very little, sometimes they had to share a can of beans or had to make do with a half-liter bottle of water for 48 hours. “The terrorists wanted the hostages to speak in low voices, and even whispering was forbidden at night. They were obsessed with lice and asked my sister to check her daughter and Emily for lice every day.
A prison guard once asked Raya where her parents were from. “My parents were born in Israel while my grandparents were born in Europe,” she replied. “Can you see it? “My mother and father come from Jaffa and Ashkelon, they have been here for many more generations than you,” the militiaman replied. “The days passed slowly until they realized they were going to be released,” Rotem said. “The Hamas people announced that they would all be released together, but one morning they just asked my niece Hila and her friend Emily to change clothes. Suddenly the two little girls were taken away. My sister is touched when she talks about this moment: she only had time for a hug.”
Rotem says that they are physically fine, but mentally they are broken. What keeps her going for now is the happiness of being home, but Raya finds it difficult to think back to Gaza: “Not just because of what she experienced, but because she left other people behind in that apartment, me “I’m still holding hostage” from Hamas. They had become like family to her.