Former hostage Liri Albag gave her first interview since being released from Gaza in January, recounting her capture at the hands of Hamas terrorists alongside other female surveillance soldiers.
“The truth is that October 7 feels like one long nightmare, and I’ve been waiting for someone to wake me up, for someone to tell me I was dreaming. But it didn’t happen. Unfortunately, this has all been real,” she told Channel 12 in an interview, scheduled to air in full on Friday.
“You see evil and hatred in their eyes,” she said of her Hamas captors.
Albag, along with Karina Ariev, Daniella Gilboa, Naama Levy and Agam Berger, was kidnapped from the IDF’s Nahal Oz military base on October 7, 2023, and released by the terror group last month in the first phase of an ongoing hostage-ceasefire deal.
Hamas terrorists killed another 15 surveillance soldiers during their attack on the base and also took two additional hostages, one who was rescued and another of whom was recovered dead after being murdered in captivity.
“I was sure that the moment we stood there tied up that they were going to slaughter us — shoot us one by one,” Albag said. “I went into survival mode, I said: ‘OK, what can I do to make it out alive?'”
“They told us, ‘If you listen to us, we won’t kill you. You’re coming with us to Gaza.’ And we told them, ‘Yes, take us to Gaza,'” she said.
Although Friday will mark her first broadcast interview since returning to Israel, Albag has previously revealed details of her captivity to the public.
She divulged last month that she and her fellow abducted surveillance soldier Agam Berger tried to mark as many Jewish holidays as possible while in Gaza, despite their captors’ attempts to prevent them from doing so.
Albag said to Shai Graucher, head of the Standing Together group that aids former hostages, that she and other hostages made sukkah ornaments for the festival of Sukkot, asked for honey and a carrot for Rosh Hashanah and even fasted on Tisha B’Av.
On Hanukkah, they asked for candles and received hot glue sticks instead. When they said that wasn’t candles, captors gave them an electric candle with a battery, which they used. “At least we lit something,” she said.