It relates the fear, the doubt, the time that does not move forward. Nili Margalit, 42, is a nurse. On October 7, when Hamas sowed death and terror in her native kibbutz of Nir Oz, the young woman was kidnapped by “civilians” who then sold her to the Palestinian nationalist movement.
“They exploded plates, turned the house upside down and started a fire,” she tells Le Point. Two minutes later, the terrorists appeared in her “mamad”, the bomb shelter built in her house, of which she had not closed the door, they kidnapped her. “Those who barricaded themselves in the mamads died, because the terrorists shot through the doors and set them on fire,” she notes. Driven by golf cart to the border between Israel and Gaza, under a white sheet, she is transferred to a car which takes her to Khan Younes, the large city in the south of the Gaza Strip, where the Israeli army withdrew this weekend, after six months of war.
In a few words, she describes to the weekly the jubilation of the crowd on her way. “The terrorists who captured me were civilians. They negotiated with Hamas to sell me. When they were paid, I was taken straight into a tunnel,” she said afterwards. She had already told that the underground lassis was nicknamed by the inhabitants the “Lower Gaza”.
Medicines not provided
In a first room, she finds around thirty inhabitants of Nir Oz, whose faces she knows at least. It's a sorting room: the oldest, the sick, form the same group who are asked what medications they usually take. To the kidnapper who speaks in Arabic, translated into Hebrew by one of the hostages, Nili Margalit indicates that she is a hospital nurse. She will become their caregiver, accessing medication, but in insufficient quantity. “We learned afterwards that Hamas had received boxes of medicine and glasses from the Red Cross, sent according to the needs of each hostage, but we never saw the color,” she complains.
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Recluse with a dozen other hostages in a tiny room that serves as a dormitory and common room, time seems to not pass. The meager meals - bread and rice - are not enough to set a rhythm. Nili does yoga to overcome immobility. “There were shouting matches, crying, laughing, it’s normal when you put ten people in the same room, we’re human! But we always supported each other,” assures the young woman. “At first, I told myself it would only last two days. Then I understood that Israel would never pay for so many hostages. This depressed some of us. We had to hold on psychologically.”
Kept outside the world, the hostages have, according to Nili, no idea of the scale of the massacres of October 7, nor of the implacable response implemented by the Jewish state. She is unaware that 75 residents of her kibbutz are hostages of Hamas and that 38 have been killed. The guards - there are usually four of them - however tell them that Israel is trying to eradicate the Palestinians. In mid-November, they will tell them about the first bombing of Al-Shifa hospital, in the center of the Palestinian enclave.
“Helping was my way of surviving”
On November 30, the seventh day of the brief truce concluded between Israel and Hamas, Nili was released. “A guard came to get me, pointed at me and said:
go, go!
“, she remembers. Hospitalized for examinations and rest in Israel, she received visits from friends and then family, and discovered the scale of the events that had been taking place for weeks. The next day, the Israeli army informed him of the death of his father, Eliyahu Margalit, whose body was still in Gaza.
After her release, Nili decided to speak for others. Unlike some hostages, she does not seem to have suffered sexual violence. In December, she wrote to Benjamin Netanyahu's war cabinet and forwarded the letter to Israeli media. She recounted the conditions of detention of the hostages, elderly, some suffering from heart problems, kidney failure or even Parkinson's disease, and did not receive any medical care. “These people are clearly on borrowed time,” she wrote.
In January, she participated in several television shows. Before France, she went to Switzerland and Luxembourg. “Helping was my way of surviving” in detention, she told Le Point. Despite the freedom, she continues.