Roughly 140 hostages remain in Hamas’s captivity, where they’ve been for the past 104 days. At the Free Press, Agam Goldstein-Almog — a 17-year-old Israeli girl who, alongside her mother and two younger brothers, survived 51 days in the tunnels — details her experience being taken from her home after watching terrorists brutally murder her father and sister and brought into an underground prison:

Living in captivity is unbearable. You live death. The days and nights all blend into one, with thoughts of death rattling your soul. Will I die quickly, like my sister did? Or will it be a long, maddening abuse? Endless, torturous thoughts ran through my brain.

I don’t know if the women I left in the tunnels are still together. As I write these words, I can still see the look in their eyes. What more have they endured? Are they still being abused? Are they still alive?

Agam’s story is harrowing. But it is required reading for anyone with a modicum of concern for human dignity. It’s impossible to understand what she and the other women in the tunnels have experienced and not come away knowing Israel’s war of retribution is morally just and morally necessary. Find it here.