Israeli Oct. 7 hostage shares how she survived 50 days in Hamas captivity after massacre: I demanded that they respect us
The first apartment the terrorists hid their hostages in Gaza had a cardboard box in the corner of the room, beside a blue double sofa, teeming with toys.Winnie the Pooh.
Two blue Smurfs, one donning a white moustache, beard and red hat, the other with a yellow hat and long mustache.For Dr.Shoshan Haran, the seemingly innocuous dolls pointed to something beyond imagination: that the Hamas-led terrorists who bulldozed, pillaged, burned, massacred, raped and kidnapped their way through southern Israel and through her tight-knit kibbutz, Be’eri, had planned in advance to take children captive.“It’s so vicious that it’s hard for me to express how you could use young children as bargaining chips,” she told The Post. Haran’s new book, “Mission in Captivity: One Woman’s Struggle to Survive and Save Her Family in Gaza,” recounts the 50 days she spent in Hamas captivity in Gaza, along with her daughter, two grandchildren, sister-in-law and niece. By the end of October 7, 2023, 102 members of the Be’eri community had been killed, including Haran’s husband, Avshalom, her younger sister, Lilach, as well as Lilach’s husband, Evyatar, and his caregiver, Paul. Tal Shoham, Haran’s son-in-law, was separated from his family and held for 505 days before his release.Unlike many hostages held in dark tunnels underground in Gaza, Haran was moved between different private homes above ground.
The fourth apartment, she could tell, belonged “to a well-off family,” with soft carpets covering the living-room floor and a “lavish chandelier” hanging from the center of the ceiling. “By holding us within private family homes,” she said, “they use us as human shields.They understand that the IDF will refrain from striking locations where hostages are known to be, effectively turning our presence into a personal shield for the captors and their families.”Inside those homes, the most unsettling part of the book unfolds.
The captors all called each ot...