Through Their Eyes | Hostages, Families, and the Journey Within
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Hello and welcome to State of the Nation. I'm Elon Levy. Mandy Damari is the mother of the only remaining British hostage, Emily. She's still trapped in Gaza. She was in Britain a few weeks ago. She begged the British government, please lead an international initiative to get humanitarian aid to the hostages. Keep them alive till we can get them out and stop voting at the United Nations for an unconditional ceasefire that means not conditional on the release of Emily and the other hostages. Yeah.

And the UK just ignored her. It hasn't put any pressure to get humanitarian aid to the hostages. It went back to the General Assembly and voted for an unconditional ceasefire that would abandon the hostages. And the families are expecting the UK to use its leverage and its pressure as an ally on Hamas's patrons, Qatar, Turkey, Iran. Stop playing nice.

These are countries that are backing a terrorist group that is holding a British hostage, and we need British power brought to bear against these countries to force Hamas to let them go now.

The mother of the only British Israeli hostage being held by Hamas has described her increasing fears for her daughter's life after more than 400 days in captivity. Emily Damari was shot and taken by Hamas gunmen from her home in southern Israel on the 7th of October.

Her mother Mandy has been speaking to our special correspondent Lucy Manning. Mandy Damari can't hold her daughter Emily, so instead must make do with just a photo. After more than 400 days as a hostage, she fears for her daughter's life. I fear that she's dead. She's the main fear. And if she's not dead, she's not getting enough food to eat. She's not being able to wash herself. There's no water.

She could be ill. She's suffering from gunshot wounds. Emily, a British Israeli, was taken by Hamas gunmen on October 7th. They shot her and killed her dog. She's a Spurs fan, often visiting family here in the UK. Emily is my youngest child. I waited for her for a long time. I love her to the moon and back.

She is a special person. You've been having meetings with the British government. What's your view? Are the British government doing enough to help release Emily? If the British government were doing enough, she'd be released already. So obviously there could be more that they could be doing.

I have met the Prime Minister and I've met the Foreign Secretary. But they, apart from not getting her released, there's no humanitarian aid getting to the hostages. And she hopes Donald Trump's recent call that there will be all hell to pay if the hostages aren't released will help Emily and the others. It made me a bit more optimistic. It gave me a bit of hope that maybe someone

does really care about what's going on there. Someone has to do something and take strong action to get them released. She is a mother counting the days until her daughter is free. Lucy Manning, BBC News. No humanitarian aid is going into Gaza for the hostages. Since Hamas started this war, Gazans have received over one million tonnes of aid. The hostages trapped in the Gaza terror dungeons have received nothing.

Emily Damari is a hostage of Hamas and a British citizen. Her mum Mandy is begging the British government: make sure humanitarian aid reaches the hostages. Emily must be released immediately. Until then, she and all the hostages need food and clean water, a doctor's visit and medicine, a change of clothes and a bar of soap. Mandy is saying:

Britain must pressure Hamas's patrons: Qatar, Turkey and Iran. They must get humanitarian aid to the starving hostages. And if they don't, there must be consequences. Britain has power. It must use it to get aid to all the hostages. The Emir of Qatar should face consequences for harbouring Hamas's leaders. He shouldn't get a red carpet. He should get a red card.

The UN must do its job. It must open an Emily Damari Corridor, a route for humanitarian aid to the hostages in the tunnels, to keep them alive until they are released. Aid workers who are distributing food and water in Gaza must walk around and ask people, "Where are the hostages?" Because the hostages are at imminent risk of death. The Emily Damari Corridor would save their lives.

So write to your lawmakers and demand: "We want an Emily Damari corridor for humanitarian aid or there must be consequences."

i want us all to take a moment and picture emily right now with mental and physical scarring that may never heal clothed in dirty rags light in her hair probably still in pain from the gunshot wounds in her hand and leg that were not treated properly shivering starving dehydrated ghostly pale her breathing shallow a bucket for a toilet impossible to get away from the stench

Watched over by people who want to murder or rape her. Terrified in every waking moment and too scared to fall asleep. Fighting to stay alive. Minute after minute, month after month, 423 days with no end in sight.

She's in hell. If there's a place where injustice is ignored and lies flourish, it's there. The truth? The UN recently tried to pass a ceasefire resolution without demanding the release of the hostages. If it weren't for the US veto, that resolution would have passed and it would have been a death sentence for our loved ones. Hamas would have no reason to release them.

We all told the UN what they didn't want to hear. They're failing. The Red Cross has failed. Not one hostage has received humanitarian aid. Not one has had a visit. Not one family has been given a sign of life. If these organisations had done their jobs, our loved ones would be home by now. Instead, we get excuses, fake supports and empty promises. I wish I could say my words and the words of the other families were enough to change things.

But the truth is the voices of four families in that massive institution feel so small. We need more voices and we need more action. Tomorrow, I fly to England to ask the British government why they supported that UN motion. Emily is their citizen, the only British hostage still held by Hamas. They told me three weeks

ago they would fight for her. So where is that fight now? Were they actually speaking the truth when they told me they're fighting for her to return home? Let me be honest with you. The fight to bring the hostages home isn't just against Hamas. It's against money, power, politics and egos. The hostages are pawns in a game played by people who don't feel the pain we feel. But I will never stop fighting for Emily.

But we, the hostage families, can't do this alone. None of us can. Governments won't act unless we push them. They won't feel accountable unless we hold them to account. Breaking news out of Israel this morning. Shocking hostage. Hundreds of Israelis are dead. I want to bring in Israeli government spokesman. What happens when a four-day court. Have you resolved this? Where does this go?

The story of Hadar Goldin is especially personal for me. We were born just a few months apart. He spent some of his childhood in Cambridge, where I had just finished studying when Hamas started the 2014 Gaza war, and I went into the army just afterwards. We could have been friends. We should have been friends. My guest today is his mother, Leah Goldin, who has been fighting for 10 years for closure and a dignified burial.

fighting the world to bring her son home and raising a red flag. Be clear on where we stand. You're saying that as part of the agreement with Turkey, there was supposed to be a clause in which the transfer of goods into Gaza through Ashdod would be conditional on the return of the bodies of the hostages. That was part of the talks. And then you get a phone call from the prime minister saying that the national interest supersedes that. That it was deleted.

it was deleted since it damages the interest of Israel. In reconciliation with Turkey, which is now threatening us with invasion. So this was a great, I take initiative, we meet the people that are behind those initiative, an initiative to build hospitals. We go to meet Gadi Eisenkot, at that time chief of staff, and saying look, Adar was kidnapped to a hospital.

So, how can you live with the fact that you build a hospital without requesting the return of Hadar in the run? And the initial reaction, no, you don't know what you are talking about. Nothing is happening. But it's happening.

We don't ask you to stop food, we don't ask you to stop humanitarian aid, whatever is needed to help people survive, you know. But whatever you give above that, beyond that, you should request the return of my son. It has been a whole year since the first, last and only hostage release deal.

November 2023, a deal that saw over 100 hostages released from Hamas captivity in exchange for a pause in the fighting and the release of Palestinian prisoners. One of those freed hostages was Aviva Segal, abducted from her home in Kfar Aza with her husband Keith. But Keith is still a hostage of Hamas, rotting in the Gaza terror dungeons. Allow myself to fall because if I fall, then who will bring Keith back home?

Because I know what Kitty's going through. You know, like all the families that are talking for their loved ones to come back and they haven't been there. It's different. It's completely different. Being there, seeing the torture in my eyes, feeling it in my heart, I know what they're going through. And I'll do everything I can. So I'll keep strong and I'll do everything I can to scream out for them because they're screaming like I did for 51 days.

Keith turned around to me and said, "They're going to take us to Gaza. We better run away." And I said to Keith, "Just do what they say because they're going to kill us." And I'm lucky that he listened to me because he wanted to run away. And then in the car, I sat next to Keith and sat next to a terrorist with a knife in front of my eyes, my face. And the one in front that sat next to the driver had a gun and was pointed in our faces.

On the morning of October 7th, I remember we still in Israel were watching in horror as we received videos on Telegram of hostages being dragged into Gaza, the jeering, happy crowds. Was that what happened to you? Exactly. I remember going out of the gate and shaking. And then I saw this photographer, the people that got the videos of me on the Telegram. I remember the photographer.

I remember his camera. It was a white one. It was a tall, dark, he looked like an Arab. He looked different than us. And I'll never forget his face while I was shaking. And they were just shouting, they were just the happiest people in earth. And coming into Gaza, there were families with babies, older people standing with their sticks and clapping their hands and shouting and shooting in the air.

And the happiest people in earth, well, I was shaking, Keith was shaking, and we just didn't understand what is going on. What are we doing in Gaza with our pajamas? Keith is 65 years old. I'm 63. We didn't fight with anybody. We never fought with anybody. We just want peace. We want good for everybody. What are we doing there? I remember at the time reacting in disbelief as a Sky News journalist saying,

said that the hostages were being held in reasonable conditions. This was before the full horror began to emerge, but already it was clear that you were going through hell. I understand you don't want to share everything and there may be a time and place and maybe you never will share that, but what can you share with the world about the abuse that you witnessed in the Gaza terror dungeons? - Yeah. First I want to say that I'm a very strong person.

And when I was abused, it was okay because I could handle it. I could tell myself, okay, so they're going to push me. They're going to pull my hair. They're going to do things that are crazy to somebody that's just an innocent person that's 63 years old. But the worst, the worst moments for me were when they tortured Keith and they tortured the girls. What do you mean by torture? One of the girls, when she came back from the bathroom,

I knew that I wasn't allowed to hug them because we weren't allowed to show any feelings. We weren't allowed to cry. I used to hide myself crying, lie down, put my hand on my head and cry very quietly that nobody will see that I'm crying because if they did, I got hell. We just had to say that everything's okay, pick our fingers up like this and say tamam in Arabic while nothing, nothing was okay. So she came back from the bathroom and I could see she was shaking and she looked ahead and

So I just got up because I felt like her mother. And I said, I'm going to hug her. I'm going to hug her. I don't care. I'm going to hug her. So I got up and I gave her a hug. And immediately, a second later, this Hamas terrorist came in and started screaming at us. And I saw him. She was with her head towards the other direction. And I looked at him in the eyes and I said, don't worry. I love her because I didn't know what happened. And I was sitting on the floor.

And I remember her talking to Keith and to the other girls that were with us. We were five at that time. And they were whispering. And I couldn't hear because my ears can't hear because one of the missiles about 13 years ago really damaged my ears. And everything that was happening there, I couldn't hear while they were whispering. And I remember them whispering for quite a while. And everybody was sad. Everybody, the atmosphere in the room was terrible.

was different than when it was before she came in. And I didn't know what happened, but I could feel that something happened. And then she came up to me and she said, "Afiva." She whispered and she said, "Afiva, I want to tell you something." And I looked in her eyes and she said, "You touched me." And she told me what he did. And then after a couple of weeks, one of the girls told me that Keith asked them to protect me, not to tell me hard things.

and to keep hard things away from me because they're too difficult for me. So I do know that she didn't tell me everything and that she thought about how telling me and what telling me because she knew and she respected Keith and she respected me. And I know that the girls did that often. They just didn't tell me because I remember one of the times that Keith said about one of the girls, "You must do everything you can

to help her. But he didn't say more than that. So I didn't understand. But now being here, I understand that the girls went through things that I don't know. When Keith comes home, maybe he'll be able to tell me. When the girls come back home, they'll be able to tell me. And that was just one thing. And the other time, he called one of the girls out of the room and he brought her back after a second with a gun in front of her face and told her to get dressed. They used to dress us

looking like Arabs with the hijab. And while she was bending down to get dressed, she turned around to us and she said that she's scared that he's going to take her and she's going to be alone. He took her hair, pulled it and threw her in such a brutal way on the floor. I remember like her falling backwards with a gun in front of her eyes, in front of my eyes too. And he said to her, one more word, I'm going to kill you.

They took her, they handcuffed her, they put a blanket over her and four terrorists that were with us, they all hit her and hit her and hit her. And after maybe 20 minutes, she came back and she sat like a little child on the floor, weeping, red, her hair was standing and she was beaten up all over. And I could not get up and give her a hug because I was scared.

But I did give her love by looking at her in the eyes and trying to be with her. And after a couple of hours, I went up to her and asked her, how come you didn't scream? I wanted to scream for you. And she said, I did not want to give them the pleasure. I was just so proud of her. So it was just like all the time, different tortures. If it was they tortured us and didn't give us food while they chewed and ate in front of us.

I mean, who would do something like that? Why? Why would anybody sit in front of somebody that didn't give us food for more than 20 hours and eat in front of us and look at us while we're looking at them and wanting just a little bit of food? But we don't. We have to sit on the floor on a filthy, dirty mattress and wait. So the girl with us

She asked, when are we going to get some food? And he looked at us, and I'll never forget that moment either. Without even blinking, he said, it takes a long time to make food. And four hours later, we got a half a piece of pita that was dry, that I had to take water to drink it down. That's how dry it was. So I said to myself, okay, tomorrow morning you'll get a little bit more. Wait. And we got another half a pita. And that was the moment that

that I started hiding food for Keith. He lost a lot of weight. I lost 10 kilos while I was in Gaza and Keith too, I'm sure. So I decided that every time we get a piece of pita, I'm going to break it in half. I'm going to bring a piece of tissue and I'm going to hide it underneath the mattress. And that's what I did. And the girl after a couple of days said, I'm going to throw it away. You're not going to eat it. So I said, no, we'll eat it. Even if it's bad.

Because we were starving. We were starving. And water, so many times, we didn't get any water. And so many times we got just a little bit of water from a bottle that the terrorist had been threatening us all the time, that he drank most of the water and just left us a little bit of water of the bottle that he drank from. So one of the days, I was starting to feel really bad. I had an infection in my stomach most of the time that I was in Gaza. And...

I asked Keith to ask for water again because I was too scared to ask for anything. And Keith begged. And he looked at me and he said, but I've begged so many times and you saw what happened. So he took the bottle and didn't say a word. And he just hold the bottle like this and waited for the Hamas terrorist to bring us water. They were drinking water. And he looked at us and he said like this, as if, what are you doing? Knowing exactly what Keith was doing.

And then 15 minutes later he came and he like grabbed the bottle like that, filled it with water because it was water in the tap. And I could see the way that he was walking from the tap to us because we were like hidden behind a sofa on mattresses on the floor. And I could see that something's going to happen. And I remember him like looking at us and he just like threw the bottle at us. Why? I just don't understand the behaviour.

I hate invoking Holocaust analogies, but when you hear stories of people smuggling half a crumb of bread here, half a crumb of bread there, it's impossible not to have flashbacks to that dark period. When you were dragged into the tunnel in Gaza, were you thinking, surely it's only days until...

the state of Israel strikes a deal, sends in Sayyarat Matkal, gets us out? Or are you thinking, oh my God, I'm stuck here forever? Okay. So first of all, the first days, I thought it was minutes, not days or hours. I thought it was minutes that I'm going to be taken out of there because I was taken in my pajamas and I didn't fight with anybody and I was taken from my house. So what am I doing there? I thought that they're going to come and take me out.

First of all, I want to take you to one of the times that they took us down to a tunnel. And that was one of the worst experiences that I will ever go through in my life or Keith. I hope so, because I don't know what's happening to Keith now. But they took us down into a tunnel and we were walking down. It was dark and slippery. While the Hamas terrorist took care about himself because he was walking with a torch in front of us.

And we're trying to walk down and we're walking and walking. And then he turns around and he says, don't worry, 40 meters underneath the ground. And he said, city, don't worry. I couldn't see a city there. I couldn't hear anything. I couldn't see anybody. And they took us to a little arch that was small. And he did this with his hand. And we knew that's our new house. So for the first two hours, two Hamas terrorists stayed there

in the entrance and they were talking and talking and then suddenly it was silence. And I remember us saying, "What? We've been left here by ourselves?" And the girl with us, she went there and she peeped and she said, "They're not there. They've gone. They just left us there." And us walking down the stairs, we could feel that there wasn't a lot of oxygen for us to breathe. So we were like huffing and puffing down. And then we were sitting there and we felt lucky that we can talk. So we spoke a little bit.

until we didn't have any strength to talk. We were just lying down on mattresses, faulty dirty ones, on the floor there, looking at each other and trying to figure out if we're going to live. There was no oxygen there for us, so we were just trying to breathe. And after more than a couple of days, Keith looks at me and he says, "I feel like I can't breathe." And I looked at him and I said, "Just lie down and try and breathe."

and just try and breathe. And that's what I did. And the girl with me did. We were just trying to breathe while there was no oxygen for us. And I was sure that I was going to die. And I just said to myself, please, God, just let me die first. I do not want to see Keith dead. I do not want to see Keith suffer. And that feeling of being underneath the ground, left alone with hardly no water and no food, that you're going to die.

I was preparing myself to die because we were left there alone, just the three of us. And I'm lucky that I had the strength to comfort Keith and to be with him. And I'm lucky that he felt comfortable to tell me that he feels like he's going to die. And I'll never, ever forget the moment that we touched the air for the first time and we breathed the air that was in the earth. And I said to myself, air.

It was the most delicious thing. If I mean chocolate's delicious, it was the most delicious. I don't know if it's the right way to say it, but it was one of the moments that I'll never, ever forget because I felt like I'm going to live. And that's just a special, a very, very special moment. But we weren't told that we're going to go through hell after that. We thought that we were lucky because they took us to a house with two terrorists. They threatened us, starved us, hit us.

Scrimped at us, frightened us all the time. All the time. We had to lie down from 5 o'clock until the next morning, until maybe 9 or 10 in the morning and not move. We weren't allowed to stand. We weren't allowed to move our bodies. And I remember being completely and utterly caught and Keith was caught. And not to talk about Keith's ribs that were broken. They used to force him to sit.

While he could hardly sit, he could hardly breathe with his ribs broken. And I even tried to help him some of the times. And I used to beg them, just give him five minutes, just five minutes to relax his body, to let him lie down. And they said, no. Keith's 65 years old. And I just want to tell you a little bit about Keith. He's American. He comes from North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His father was a professor of public health. He taught in UNC. Many, many people.

from all over the world and he came to live in Israel. We fell in love very, very quickly. I got married. I wasn't even 20 years old. I was a week before I was 20 because Keith is the most special, gentle, loving person he knows. And he does not deserve to be there. He does not deserve to go through hell like he's going through. And it just doesn't seem right.

It seems like the cruelest thing, you know, that us as humans know what they're going through and that they still do. None of the hostages deserve to be there. All the hostages. Obviously. Yeah. And since you were freed in the hostage release deal in November, you've been extremely vocal campaigning. I wonder if you can tell me a little bit about your conversations with government officials. To what extent you feel that they understand the crisis of the hostages?

and really are doing everything they can to get them out. I've got a feeling, you know, it's just a feeling, that Biden is trying to do everything he can, everything he can to get them. I believe that he really understands Keith's situation and all the hostages that are there. With Bibi Netanyahu, I feel that it's different. I'm not a politician, but I can tell you what I feel. Keith and the hostages and the girls that I was with and the hostages that are still there, Emily,

That's my daughter's best friend and Gali and Zev and Doron from Gaza. They are still there. Professor Jonathan Dekelchen was a resident in Kibbutz near Oz, a mile away from Gaza with his family. By the grace of God, he wasn't home that gruesome weekend and survived. But his son, Sagi Dekelchen, 35, a US-Israeli citizen, was taken hostage as he fought to hold back the terrorist invasion.

At around quarter to seven in the morning, he was one of the first people who was awake, of course, on the kibbutz, who spotted groups of terrorists that had come in. And he spotted a group, immediately notified the kibbutz as a whole that there were terrorists inside the kibbutz, and our first responder team that's on the kibbutz, so that they could get organized to figure out what comes next.

He then spent the next couple of hours as what turned out to be 200 heavily armed, well-trained Nuhba terrorists rampaged through the kibbutz along with several hundred looters, mostly unarmed.

but violent in their own right, from little children all the way up to grannies. These were civilians from the Gaza Strip who came in with the, what was it, the second, the third wave into Israel? Very close on the heels of the Nuhba terrorists, evidently. Streamed across in the hundreds, if not thousands, into near OZ.

to essentially steal anything that they could get their hands on and then burn whatever they couldn't move or didn't want to move. So that included in the end everything from my grandchildren's tricycle that I had near my home to our largest farm machinery. And this is well-documented aerial footage of our property being streamed into Gaza. In any case, for the next couple of hours until around 8.30 p.m.,

Sagi worked alongside the first responder team, trying first of all to understand what was going on because we had no warning whatsoever. And for those who aren't familiar, every kibbutz down south has, when you say first responders, these are civilian defense teams who are lightly armed, albeit, but they're supposed to be the first line of defense against any

potential terrorist infiltration. Yeah, it's also, that's absolutely true. But it's also important to note that this first responder team are also our firemen in case there's a fire on the kibbutz. These same guys distributed food during the COVID lockdown with golf carts, just running around the kibbutz and distributing lunch to everyone or anyone who wanted it. So these are just good-willed, mostly young men, but not so young men as well.

And our, their job. And I,

I was sort of the old fogey in that group. The job in a military situation is to simply contain, observe, and connect to the army when it arrives. And here's the key element of that day, certainly on the kibbutzim. We've always been trained and expected and been told by the army that from the moment the Israeli army, that from the moment there's a border infiltration, we're about a mile from the border,

When there's a border infiltration, the army will arrive in force within 15 minutes tops. 15 minutes. 15, one five minutes. And in the meantime, that first responder team is there to figure out what's going on, to observe and to engage only when there's danger, lives are endangered because we're simply not equipped and we don't have the numbers to do much more than that.

What preceded all along the border, the invasion, was a massive rocket attack designed specifically to get people into their shelters. Hamas knew this. They knew an awful lot about how the army and how the kibbutzim would respond. Everyone's in their bomb shelter. As it were, kind of easy targets for the terrorists. They knew that they couldn't be opened from outside. Those people and...

The first responder teams were communicating this to our people, although it was difficult to communicate because inside the bomb shelters, there's no telephone reception. So not all information was transmitted. What they tried to transmit was that to try in any way possible to hold the door closed. If you happen to be a very strong man or, um,

If you happen to be very creative and jerry-rig the door, the door handle in such a way that it couldn't be depressed, they could not get in. When they could not get in where possible, they would fire through the door. In some cases, we learned the doors were bulletproof. In other cases, they weren't. If firing in with their kalachnikovs didn't work, they fired RPGs into the safe rooms through the doors. If that didn't work, they set explosives. And if that didn't work,

They set the house on fire in believing, and it was correct, that those who were in the bomb shelters faced one of two alternatives. To remain in the shelters and die of smoke inhalation, which many did, or to exit the shelters and then either be executed on the spot or be taken hostage.

I don't know if an Israeli, a true Israeli victory can be gained after October 7th, no matter what the military outcome of the war. I don't know. I know for sure that we can't even start to talk about victory if the hostages don't come home.

My guest today brings to bear decades of experience on the field as a military correspondent, Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief, author and now fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute. Yaakov Katz has literally written the book on Israeli military tactics not once but three times, with more yet to come.

He joins me in the studio to take us through the innovations of the IDF operations in Gaza and how, as he puts it, this war represents an unprecedented battlefield. Why has Israel developed these phenomenal methods of precision that other militaries haven't? What was the operational need that drove the ability to innovate these new forms of weapons? I don't think it was an operational need. From what I've come to think,

is it really stems from two primary interests and motivations. But I want to talk about the most important one. And that is our morals. It really is a Jewish way of life. People will scoff, they'll laugh, they'll be like, nah, come on. It is. We sanctify life. It's a crazy thing. The fact that we're talking six months into a war, how many hostages are we going to get back, right? I always say to people, when you think about the hostages for a moment,

How many are alive? We don't know. They're talking about maybe getting 40, 50 out. Ceasefire for six, seven weeks. Rationally, that makes no sense. You're about to destroy Hamas potentially and you're going to stop the war for 40 people?

Does that make sense? Who would think to do that? To my Jewish mind, it absolutely does. But to your Jewish mind, it makes sense because we value every single life. So the same way we value the lives of our own people, we also value the lives of their people. And it's not me who says this. Golda Meir, right, her famous line is the moment they start to care about their children the same way we do, we won't have, paraphrasing here for a moment, but there will be peace. There won't be a need for war.

It comes and it really stems from that value and that sanctity of life. The question is really, why is Hamas still holding on to Ariel and Kfir Bibas? That's the question people should be asking. Now, why can't Israel get them back? Why are these two beautiful redheaded boys still being held in the Gaza Strip? So I'm sitting down for a difficult conversation with Ayelet Razin Bet-Or, a leading advocate

fighting to raise awareness about Hamas's use of violence as a weapon of war and helping Israel piece together this horrific jigsaw. I try to raise the alarm and say we need to get these hostages out because we fear they are being starved and tortured and executed, we know that, and raped. Now I've been very careful in my media interviews not to say anything

that the hostage survivors have not been saying in their testimony. What do we know from the hostage survivors, the survivors of Hamas captivity, about the sexual abuse taking place against the hostages in the Hamas terror dungeons right now? We have

Four hostages, released hostages, women that talk about these issues, they saw with their own eyes. For instance, a demand that they shower with the door open. They heard testimonies from other hostages still in captive that they are raped by numerous terrorists.

with a gun put to their head. - Yes, there was that horrific testimony from Goldstein-Almog about sexual assault gunpoint. - Repeatedly. - Repeated. - Yeah, repeatedly. - It's not one incident, and it's important to talk about that. - At gunpoint. - There's a grave concern that they are getting pregnant from these actions, and the hostages need to be, all of them need to be released immediately.

not only because of this, but also because of this. And we heard that horrific testimony from Aviva Siegel at the Knesset about how the terrorists are dressing the women up as dolls, using them as puppets on a string to do whatever they want, whenever they want. These are hostage survivor Aviva Siegel's words. They are considered spoils of war. They took many hostages. Many of them are women. They're...

or their property. Essentially, the hostage survivor testimonies are telling us that the hostages are being held as slaves and repeatedly raped by Hamas terrorists. One of the many reasons why it's imperative that we get the hostages out immediately and they cannot stay there a minute later because of what we know about the sexual abuse

And yet while that is happening and we fear that these hostages are being raped in the Hamas terror dungeons, the world's response has been deafening in its silence. We are in a critical moment. The hostages there need us to get out and scream. Can you imagine your husband or your daughter or your grandfather to be there underneath the ground begging, begging to be taken out? So I want to ask you all to be with us

and feel for us and feel for them and to go out to demonstrations and scream, scream for the hostages as loud as you can. Talk about what I've been talking about with your family at work, wherever you can to help. You can wear a pin or a red ribbon or anything that you can think about.

that people will understand that they haven't been forgotten because we cannot allow ourselves to forget them. They're there underneath the ground screaming to be taken out.

And that brings us to the end of today's episode of State of the Nation. If you find these episodes informative, please follow and subscribe on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on all social media platforms. Please share the link, share the episode with a friend who needs to find that courage to speak up and shout out and scream more for the hostages until every single one of them is home. I'm Elon Levy, and thanks for joining us.