A former hostage fought for her own life in Gaza. A year on, she fights for her husband's freedom
As a hostage in Gaza, Aviva Siegel found herself begging for food and water. Since her release, she has found herself begging for her husband to be set free from his own ongoing captivity.
Siegel has come to embody the disaster that befell Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Armed Hamas militants snatched her from her home and thrust her into Gaza’s web of tunnels. Released during a brief cease-fire in November, she returned to find her community destroyed and became one of tens of thousands of Israelis displaced by conflict. She has emerged as a prominent voice in the struggle to free the remaining hostages, fighting tirelessly for her husband’s release.
But as her ordeal reaches the one-year mark, Israel’s attention is focused not on the plight of the hostages and their families, but on fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon. It’s the latest diversion to chip away at Siegel’s hope that she may reunite with her husband of 43 years anytime soon.
“The hostages, they are being left to die. To die slowly. How can I handle that? I just don’t know how to handle it anymore,” she said, sitting beside a poster of her husband, Keith, a 65-year-old American Israeli originally from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Her torment is all the more acute because she knows firsthand what her husband is enduring.
“Hostages were chained, tortured, starved, beaten up into pieces. I saw that in front of my eyes. That’s what they did to us,” she said from a short-term rental apartment in Tel Aviv, one of the many places she has lived since her return during the November cease-fire, the first and only deal reached between Israel and Hamas during the war.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to continue the war until “total victory” over Hamas and pledged to bring home the hostages, but has faced widespread criticism that dozens remain captive a year after the attack. Netanyahu has also argued that the pressure on Hezbollah will, in turn, lead to pressure on its ally Hamas and help speed up the release of the hostages.
The Siegels were jolted awake on Oct. 7 at their home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, one of the hardest-hit communities that day, by a burst of air raid sirens. Like so many others, they took cover in their safe room, built to protect against rocket attacks, that turned out to be no match for the rifle- and grenade-toting Hamas militants who stormed their home.
In its attack, Hamas kidnapped roughly 250 people, including women, children and older people. It killed some 1,200 people — most of them civilians — according to Israeli authorities. The war the attack sparked has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians, over half of them women and children, according to health officials in Gaza.
Hamas has said the hostages are treated humanely, but multiple accounts from freed hostages contradict that.
The militants led the Siegels out of their house, shoved her husband, breaking his ribs, and shot him in the hand, Siegel said. They were forced into their own car and driven into Gaza, where crowds of onlookers cheered at their capture.
Their first stop was a home with a living room that opened up into an underground tunnel.
“And there’s somebody underneath the hole, in the hole underneath the ground, that’s waiting with a smile, happy as can be. I’ll never forget his face,” she said.
They climbed down a steep ladder into the tunnel, one of several they were held in throughout Siegel’s 51 days in captivity. All told, Siegel was moved around 13 times, held in both tunnels and militants’ homes, she said.
