Chen Goldstein-Almog, 48, and her 17-year-old daughter Agam Goldstein-Almog who were taken hostage on October 7 during Hamas’s shock onslaught and released from Gaza in late November in a temporary truce deal, say their captors largely wanted to “keep them happy” during their 51 days of captivity in Gaza and detailed harrowing brushes with Israeli air strikes in the Palestinian enclave.

Speaking to Channel 12 news Friday some three weeks after they were freed, the mother and daughter said they did what they could to survive and “stay sane,” and developed a sometimes tense and combative but largely civil rapport with their captors under terrifying circumstances.

They were taken hostage and held in Gaza with Chen’s two young sons (and Agam’s brothers), 11-year-old Gal and 9-year-old Tal, and were always indoors in an unspecified place, with the days and nights stretching ahead. The boys, said Agam, “felt that we had little energy, and kept to themselves, except when sometimes there were outburts and fights between them” which she said quickly invited shouts and threats from their guards to be quiet.

Agam said that she feared being raped or sexually abused, as other female hostages had, and that their captors taunted the 17-year-old that she would be “married off” to someone in Gaza and that they would “find [her] a husband.”

Rape, she said, was “the first thing I was afraid of” on the petrifying drive into Gaza. “I told my mother: ‘They are going to rape me.’ I asked the driver: ‘Just together, keep us together.’ And we really stayed together, surprisingly.'” she told Channel 12.

Chen and Agam were home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza on October 7 together with husband and father Nadav, eldest child Yam, 20, and Gal and Tal when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists launched their vicious attack on southern Israeli communities that Saturday morning under the cover of a deluge of rockets.

The family was in the saferoom, hiding in fear, when terrorists entered their home.

“I was very afraid and then when they came,” Agam said. “When they stood outside the door and shouted at us, I had some kind of stress release like ‘that’s it, I’m going to die.’ And I accepted that.”

Nadav tried to stop the terrorists and was “shot in the chest at point-blank range,” said Chen. Yam was “shot in the face,” described her mother who said it was very difficult to process in that moment what she was seeing.

Chen, Agam, and the boys were taken out of the house at gunpoint and dragged into Gaza, among some 240 people who were taken hostage that day and held in the Palestinian enclave.

Nadav and Yam became among the 1,200 people killed on October 7, most of them civilians in their homes, like the Goldstein-Almogs, and young adults at an outdoors music festival.

Chen said that every day in Gaza, she forced herself to “never forget what I saw,” even in “the most difficult, and scary, and dark moments.”

The mother described the car ride into Gaza: “I remember the look of my children’s faces. To process what happened there, at home, and where I was going, it was crazy.”

During the ride, the terrorists picked up bodies into the vehicle, but it was not clear whose and if they were the corpses of terrorists killed in the attack on Israel, according to the report.

In Gaza, the family was held together in an apartment with two captors who guarded them 24/7 for the first few weeks until Israel’s ground campaign began pushing into the Palestinian enclave.

“They would sometimes talk to us about Gilad Shalit,” said Chen, in reference to the IDF soldier would was abducted in 2006 and held for five years by Hamas in Gaza before his 2011 release for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, including the current Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar.

Chen said mentions of Shalit were made by “these smirks, like mocking us about it.”

“These were my worries, that maybe it’ll take years [until we are released]? “said Chen, adding that the captors were “flying high” following the October 7 attacks.

“It was also some kind of statement to us, that the state doesn’t care, that it took five years for [Shalit] to be returned, and that the state only cares about the fighting,” she said.

At first, the surviving Goldstein-Almog family members did not know that Nadav and Yam were dead and only found out on a Friday afternoon while listening to the radio provided to them and hearing an interview with a family member in which the interviewer said: “We share in your sorrow for Nadav and Yam.”

“It was the first time Gal, 11 and a half years old, cried,” said Chen. “We kind of knew but it was hard to hear it.”

The radio was used as a tool to sometimes punish the family.

Chen and Agam described incidents in which the guards would yell at the young boys and Agam would push back. They communicated with each other in a mix of English, Arabic, and Hebrew.

“It was frightening and I would tell my mom ‘he’s not their dad, he’s not going to discipline them…they shouldn’t say a word to them, they shouldn’t dare, they brough them here so they should deal with it,” said Agam, adding that she would sometimes curse her captors and they would get offended and retaliate.

“And then I would not get the radio, or they would play these games like ‘oh today, there’s not much food,'” Agam said.

One day, Chen said, one of the guards asked Agam how she was doing that morning and she replied “shit,” which was interpreted as a personal insult.

“All day, he didn’t speak to us and didn’t give us the radio,” said Chen.

“We stayed quiet and he went off into the corner in the apartment. I went to him in the middle of the day and I said ‘what’s up today, you woke up on the wrong side of the bed? You’re not with us in the room? Come talk to us,’ Agam said she told him.

“We were always asking for the radio, it was the only thing that connected us to reality,” said Agam. The mother and daughter would alternate with their request, trying to gauge the mood of their captors.

One day, the guard told Chen “today, forget the radio” in English.

“And then I got up,” said Agam, “and I told him ‘you won’t speak to my mother that way, you don’t want to give us the radio, ok, you don’t have to, but you are not to speak that way'” she said she told the guard.

“He went off into the living room, angry, didn’t speak to us for two hours. Then he got up, bought batteries, and brought us the radio,” she said.

The mother and daughter agreed that the captors grew somewhat fond of them, giving Agam the nickname “Salsabil” which means freshwater in Arabic. Agam is Hebrew for “lake.”

To Chen, they said, “‘We love you, don’t go home. Go to Tel Aviv, don’t return to Kfar Aza,'” she said.

“They have plans to come back, there should be no illusion, they’re not bowing down, they’ll come back more [next time], that’s what they said. They are intoxicated” by October 7, Chen said.

There were also moments of what could be considered levity in the horrible circumstances. Agam would keep up with her workout routine, which she said her captors commended her on, and there was even an arm wrestling competition.

“He — the younger one — brought a towel, because he’s not allowed to touch me,” Chen said.

During the first month, the family was moved a number of times in the middle of the night. “There were days when we slept with the hijab on, because every time we moved, we had to get dressed.”

Agam said she even asked to be moved once the air strikes got closer and scarier.

“There was a strong bombing and my whole body started shaking and I said to the terrorist: ‘We need to move from here,'” she said.

“It’s crazy booms that are physical,” said Chen. “It’s panic, it’s dread, it’s something physical that would take us a while to calm down from it. It’s something we couldn’t control, and we live in the Gaza periphery, we know what it’s like.”

“We’re telling the stories of these things about the things that supposedly were normal in a not-normal situation because we believed that’s what kept us a little sane. We believed that there are no bad people – but there are people who feel bad.”

Agam described one incident in which the family was staying at a school where a “nice woman welcomed us and offered us water and arranged a place for us to sleep,” and “I turned to my mother and said ‘there are good people in the world.'”

“And five minutes later, they shot a barrage of rockets from the school [into Israel] and everyone was shouting ‘Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar’ and I told her forget what I said.”

Another time, the family stayed somewhere behind a supermarket and the guards brought mattresses for them to use. “There were strikes…and we took the mattresses and put them over us and then our guards, our captors, the terrorists were on top, protecting us with their bodies. We were valuable to them,” said Chen.

“They wanted us happy, they tried to supply food, sometimes we helped make the food,” Chen said.

In the last week of their captivity in Gaza before their release, they were taken into tunnels where they were held with other hostages.

Chen described tougher situations for them, especially the young women. “There were girls there who were alone, alone for 50 days, 19-year-olds, alone, who underwent difficult things, personally. They were desecrated [raped], harmed.”

Men also suffered such abuse, and torture, they said.

Chen said she promised the young female hostages that she would speak to their families and let them know they are alive.

“I don’t want anyone to think that we were ok there, that they are good [people]… that we saw some kind of humanity in them,” Agam said, to which Chen interjected that “it’s what kept us sane there.”

“We will never forgive and we will never show any kind of empathy towards these people. If we believed that there was a chance for peace, we lost all faith in these people, especially after we were there and among the population,” said Agam.

The family, living temporarily in Tel Aviv, has been trying to come to terms with a life without a father and a sister, Chen said.

“We were a happy home, a home with laughter,” she added. “It will always be a part of us. The abysses of pain are very, very deep.”

“We didn’t have the closure that every human being who buries someone has,” Chen described. “We didn’t have a funeral, and not a shiva…. To be honest, I thought it would be easier, but it’s just worse than I thought.”