Human Rights Voices

When Aviva Siegel thinks back to the 51 days she spent as a hostage in Gaza, the spectre of Israeli women returning from sexual assault, bleeding and bruised, crowds her mind.

'I'm a witness of all of the girls who were beaten up into pieces,' she tells the Daily Mail from her home in northern Israel.

When one girl came back after the abuse, 'she was purple; I wanted to die,' Aviva admits. 'That was one of the hardest moments: knowing what was happening to the young girls.'

Women around the 65-year-old were forced by their Hamas captors into wearing tight, barely fitting clothing, and showering naked in front of the terrorists – with one guard entering the bathroom and forcing a girl into performing oral sex.

She sits next to her husband, Keith, who was kidnapped alongside her from their former home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza on October 7, 2023, one of the hardest-hit communities during Hamas' deadly onslaught.

It's almost been three years since that fateful day, yet the duo are still haunted by a mental 'album of pictures' from Gaza. 'Sometimes they run after me, and try to control me, and control my head,' Aviva says.

Keith, 67, who wasn't freed until after 484 days in the enclave, still finds himself obsessively showering, convinced he is somehow still imprinted by the 'dirt, the dust, the smoke' of the underground tunnel network.

'I even think, to this day, that I haven't been able to get rid of some of it. I sometimes have weird thoughts about not being clean,' he says.

Aviva, who was born in South Africa, released a book about the harrowing experience in March named 'The Main Thing is to Wake up to a New Morning,' written following her November 2023 release from captivity.

'Everybody who reads the book will feel what it's like to be a hostage in Gaza, underneath the ground, feeling like it's the end of the world,' she says.

Their story starts off the same as the thousands of other Israeli survivors of the massacre, which saw 1,200 people killed and 250 taken captive by Hamas.

On the morning of October 7, the couple bolted up at 6.30am to the sound of sirens blaring.

At 10.30am, Hamas gunmen stormed their home and broke into the safe room where they were hiding.

'They pulled us violently, brutally, out of the safe room, into our living room, and we were surrounded by between ten and 15 terrorists, screaming at each other and screaming at us,' Keith says.

During the brutal kidnapping, which saw militants ordering the couple to exit their home through the back window, Keith's ribs were broken and the meniscus in Aviva's knee was torn.

On the way to the car, terrorists shot Keith in the arm. Once in the vehicle, the couple sat, petrified, with one militant holding a knife to their faces and the other a gun.

Once in Gaza, Aviva was told to wear a hijab, while Keith was put in a robe.

The couple were kept together, but that brought little solace for Aviva, who was constantly terrified she'd witness her husband's death by asphyxiation in the torturous tunnel network.

'After a couple of days, Keith looked at me and said he couldn't breathe, because there was a lack of oxygen. I couldn't breathe myself, and I remember trying to figure out what was happening, or if we were just going to die,' she says.

'I said to him, "Just lie down and try and breathe". And while he lay down, I was scared to look at Keith, dead.

'I remember saying to myself, "Just don't look at him, because you don't want to see him dead". And just trying to say, "Please, let me die first, because I don't want to see Keith dead."'

For much of her time in Gaza, Aviva had to learn how to disconnect her mind from her body and dissociate entirely, 'because it was too much to feel'.

If she allowed herself to feel, the visceral urge to take her own life would become overwhelming.

'Because to see the girls being beaten, or Keith being threatened, or Keith being starved – and falling when he wanted to get up to the bathroom, because he was so weak – and all those things... I wanted to die. I just wanted to die.'

The couple testified to the United Nations Committee against Torture in November last year about the sexual abuse and torture Hamas captors wielded systematically against the hostages.

'Our captors compared the intimate parts of myself and another hostage, threatened us with knives, leaving us to beg to go to the bathroom,' Keith told the panel in Geneva, Switzerland.

He described how he was 'denied the most basic of human rights. I was starved and denied water. More than once, young terrorists forced me to strip in front of them and shaved my body.'

Aviva recounted how a 16-year-old female hostage who had 'never ever [shown] anybody her body' was sexually assaulted.

'The Hamas terrorist just stood there and stared at her, and smiled. I remember looking at her while she came out of there. She was shocked, I was shocked. So many minutes of being shocked,' she told the committee.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, Keith says his experience with his captors turned darker on December 1, 2023, when the temporary ceasefire collapsed, and the Israeli bombardment of the enclave resumed.

'Then the terrorists became even more cruel, more violent, and the treatment was much worse,' he says.

'I'm lying on my back, on the floor. He came up to me, standing above me, and he starts screaming at me and cursing me.

'And he spat on me, he kicked me. He kicked me in my legs, and he kicked me in my ribs.'

When trapped in the tunnels, Keith was barred from standing up, and had to beg for permission to use the bathroom.

He lost about 35kg from being starved, while Aviva lost 10kg. Meanwhile, their captors were 'putting on weight, because they were eating all the time' in front of the hostages, Aviva recalls.

'They didn't care,' she says.

After 51 days in captivity, Hamas released Aviva as part of a temporary ceasefire deal brokered by Qatar and the US, alongside 13 other Israeli hostages and three foreign nationals.

She didn't know it yet, but Keith was to remain in the Strip for another year, two months, and six days.

At first, the guards refused to let her say goodbye, but she wouldn't take no for an answer.

'I said to him, "You'll be strong for me, and I'll be strong for you." I remember saying that, and really feeling that deep inside my heart,' she says.

From then on, Keith was rotated around 30 locations in the enclave — passed between tunnels, schools, apartments, homes — and encountered 60 terrorists.

For six months, he was kept in total isolation.

As a way of keeping sane, he kept stock of his surroundings and retained a sense of curiosity, even attempting to learn Arabic.

He said 'good morning' and 'good night' to his captors, in their language, thanking them every time for food, however meagre, or for letting him go to the toilet.

It was a way of forging a connection to the men abusing him, in the hopes of making the environment more bearable, and him appear more human.

'Please help me learn Arabic. It's very important to me,' he'd say to his guards, as an attempt to draw on their shared humanity.

One guard acceded to his pleas, and asked Keith to repeat some words in a call-and-response.

What he didn't realise was that the guard was mockingly converting Keith to Islam by making him recite the Shahada.

'He said the word, I said the word. He said the word, I said the word, and then he said: "Okay, now you're a Muslim."'

Keith responded defiantly, momentarily breaking his tactic of trying to appease his captors: 'No, I'm not a Muslim, I'm a Jew.'

Over 484 days, he said he had around 25 chances 'to put water on my body'. He stops short of calling the ritual a shower, because it involved just a 'bucket of water and a cup'.

At one point in the tunnel, he was being kept with a fellow hostage and three terrorists. Between them, there was one toilet that they were able to flush only once a day.

'I don't want to get too graphic about how disgusting it was. I just tried not to go to the toilet as much as I could.

'They had locked us up in a room, so we had to beg to go to the toilet. We had to knock on the door, and wait for them to come.

'If you need to go to the toilet in the middle of the night, you don't want to agitate them or get them angry, because then they'll take their agitation and anger out on me.

'So I'm just holding on until I feel like I can't hold on any longer,' he says.

By the end of his almost 500 days in captivity, Keith was worried he was so weak that he wouldn't be able to crawl out of the tunnels.

On February 1, 2025, he was handed over to the Red Cross, which delivered him to IDF soldiers who escorted him into Israel, as part of phase one of a mediated ceasefire-hostage release deal.

He was reunited with Aviva, and their four children – Shai, Gal, Elan, and Shir – but the family would never return to Kibbutz Kfar Aza, the border community decimated by the October 7 attacks.

Originally a close-knit cooperative of 950 residents, some 64 people were killed and another 19 were taken hostage that day, changing its fabric forever.

Aviva was a kindergarten teacher, and had been for 40 years by the time of the massacre. 'Lots of the 64 people that were murdered, if I didn't look after them, then I looked after the kids. Lots of them,' she says.

'We lost our community. We lost that home... When I'm sitting in this house, it's a home, it's got walls, but I'm not there yet.'