January 15, 2024 at 9:36 AM ET
“They took me, and what was left of my family, and I felt like this was it, and now we live in Gaza,” she told the Washington Post. “That's why I felt like it would last forever.”
Ajam said that she was forbidden from crying. She would not have mourned for her father and her older sister, Yam, 20, who were shot dead by gunmen in their family home. She recalled that the kidnappers would sometimes scream at her, and at other times they would try to win her sympathy with looted creams and perfumes.
After aiming her guns, Agam said they warned her family — especially her two brothers, ages 9 and 11 — not to make noise. She remembers that the kidnappers said that if Israel discovered their hiding place, the army would kill them all.
It was one of countless lies told to assert “absolute control,” Ajam realized after her release in late November — during a temporary humanitarian truce that included the release of more than 100 hostages from Hamas captivity.
“They also knew they were safe thanks to us,” she added. “That's why they gathered around us in large groups.”
In her first interview with international media, Ajam described the terror and confusion she experienced over nearly two months as a hostage inside Gaza, held with her mother, Chen, and two brothers, Tal and Gal. Speaking from Shefayim, a kibbutz in central Israel that has become a way station for hundreds of her displaced neighbors, she recounted extreme exhaustion, the oppressive stench of the tunnels, and relentless psychological torture.
The conversation was repeatedly directed at the 136 hostages believed to still be held in Gaza. The Red Cross was not allowed to visit them. The youngest, Kfir Bibas, will turn one this week.
The newspaper was unable to independently confirm Ajam's story, but it agrees with the account of other former hostages. Agam said there are details she still cannot share to protect those they left behind. She thinks about them constantly. She tries to be their voice: “There's nothing else I can do.”
Israel on Sunday marked 100 days since October 7, when Hamas-led militants overran towns across the south, killing 1,200 people and dragging 240 men, women and children into Gaza. Businesses closed for 100 minutes and more than 100,000 people gathered in Tel Aviv for a 24-hour march in solidarity with the hostages and their “100 days in hell.”
At the beginning of the concert on Saturday night, Ajam addressed the women detained in Gaza: “Have you eaten enough today? Are you together, or have they separated you? Did he hurt you again? Did he ask you again, if you were married, if he could arrange you a relationship with someone from Gaza? Did he walk into your bathroom again, strip down to the pajamas he gave you, and touch the wound from the bullet he shot that really hurt you? But his control was more painful.”
She said: “We were released before we lost hope, before we lost our minds.” “What about you?”
The Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza led to the deaths of more than 23,000 people, most of them women and children, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. The Israeli army says at least 9,000 fighters are among the dead. Israeli officials insist that military pressure is the only way to secure another deal to release the hostages. But Ajam worries that time is running out for those still inside. Women are particularly vulnerable, she said.
When Agam was taken out of her home by gunmen — some in military uniform, others in jeans and flip-flops — and driven to Gaza in her mother’s stolen car, a short, silent journey, she immediately realized how little she was wearing.
“I was wearing my short pajamas. Everything was very exposed. They were controlling,” she said. “So they took me, at my most naked, and I was half asleep.”
She said that the guards took turns coming in and out throughout her captivity. Sometimes there were two men, sometimes six. One of them was a teacher. Another told her that he was studying at a local university. Ajam said that someone asked her to teach him Hebrew. In the small, dark spaces, they stared at her day after day, week after week, she recounted. They told her that Israel had abandoned her, that she would remain in Gaza for years, and that she would marry a local man.
They reminded her of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier captured by Hamas in 2006 and held for five years before being exchanged for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.
In a tunnel where her family spent a week before their release, Agam met six women. Some were seriously injured. Agam said she and her mother helped dress the wounds with dwindling supplies. One woman, whose skin has already begun to develop crusts over her stitches and black bandages from overuse, told Agham she looked forward to receiving proper care in Israel. She is still in Gaza.
Some were held alone, away from others, in small rooms with their captors. They told Agam and her mother – some immediately, others days later – “with great difficulty and tears” that they had been sexually assaulted.
“That was the first question we asked when we understood they were alone: How did they treat you?” she said. “Suddenly they had a friend to tell, someone they could ease their burdens from. We cried together.”
Ajam did not say whether she was sexually assaulted. She was released on November 26. “They suddenly attacked us and asked us to be ready at 9 a.m.,” she recalled. “And they said to the other girls, who weren't coming home, maybe tomorrow – hopefully – God willing, tomorrow, tomorrow.
It was another lie. They are among 19 women still detained in Gaza.
Hamas released thirty-nine children and teenagers. They were thin and pale, and some had light shrapnel wounds. Many have learned Arabic phrases such as “Oscott “Be silent,” and some had to be told that they no longer needed to whisper.
At Schneider Children's Medical Center, which received many of the released families, staff were concerned about refeeding and the risk of over-exerting malnourished bodies. Many children have been conditioned to small parts. Mothers often went hungry so their children could eat; Even in the hospital, they kept their children close to them, fearing they would be taken away again.
In the early days, “everyone was in this kind of euphoria, coupled with deep sadness and distrust,” said Dr. Efrat Bron-Harlev, Schneider’s president. A number of the hostages were sedated with clonazepam, a powerful sedative, before they were released, “so they would appear happy,” Hagar Mizrahi, an Israeli Health Ministry official, told the Knesset last month.
Doctors said that as the effects of the drugs and adrenaline wore off, there were night terror attacks, anxiety attacks and tantrums.
For Agam — who has now been free for nearly as many days as she was in captivity — returning to Israel remains difficult to fathom. She once visited her old home and learned about the full extent of the atrocities committed on October 7.
She said her captors repeatedly told her that the attack was justified and that it was just an “opening strike.”
“They were screaming at us, saying that this country belongs to them,” Ajam recalls. They said their goal was to pray in Jerusalem. They told us that when they come back, they will come back bigger and stronger. They told us that Hamas in Gaza has about 40,000 fighters, and next time, all 40,000 will come, not 3,000.”
The militants advised her family not to return to their kibbutz, and suggested they move to Tel Aviv or New York.
Ajam said that they had a parting message before she was released: “Don’t remember our faces.” And the people of Gaza – good.”
Lior Soroka in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.
