Israel-Gaza: Woman held hostage after Hamas killed her husband and daughter describes ordeal
The death of Chen Almog-Goldstein’s 20-year-old daughter Yam was just the start of her ordeal.
The final time Chen saw her, Yam was convulsing on the floor of their home after being shot in the face by a Hamas terrorist; minutes earlier, Chen’s husband Nadav had also been killed by a bullet in his chest. They were forced to step over his body as they were led out of the safe room at gunpoint. There was no time to say goodbye.
“He [Nadav] took this wooden plank and he stood there at the entrance to the safe room to protect his family. And then they broke into the safe room,” Chen recalls.
“Maybe he managed to hit them with this wooden plank? I remember that I turned around and there were four or five of them inside the safe room yelling, and they shot Nadav in the chest from very close range in two or three places. He was lying like that with his arms up. He was quiet. I thought that maybe he was pretending.”
Outside she said it was “quiet, kind of idyllic” and they thought Israeli forces would come to their rescue any minute. It didn’t happen.
After first trying, but failing, to start the family’s hybrid car, the Hamas gunmen bundled Chen and her three surviving children into another vehicle and left kibbutz Kfar Aza.
Yam, 20, was killed on 7 October
Hostages for seven weeks
For seven minutes, on the 7 October, they were driven into Gaza. They would remain there for seven weeks, hostages from Israel’s darkest day.
CCTV from the border fence shows the red SUV driving fast along the road and then turning off, onto a dusty field where Nadav used to train for triathlons.
“I remember the looks on the children’s faces. They were looking at me with these very deep looks and they said, ‘Mom, what happened to your lips?’ Because my lips turned completely white. I was shocked,” Chen said.
Chen’s husband, Nadav, who was killed by Hamas
‘Our abductors were overjoyed’
“Near the fence they stopped and they started putting bodies into the trunk of the car and Agam [her son] said to the boys, don’t look back, not to look back. Our abductors were overjoyed, they took a selfie picture, they took pictures of us in the backseat,” she said.
“I remember a Red Cross ambulance, and I was looking and kind of begging with this look that was asking for help. And he looked back at me with this helpless look, and that was it.”
After switching cars they drove to a house behind closed gates and went down a tunnel shaft. For the first time, nine-year-old Tal began to cry.
For most of their time in Gaza, the four of them were watched over by the same six guards. Other than brief glimpses of the sea, they weren’t sure where they were in Gaza.
The family’s safe room after Hamas gunmen burst in
They spoke to their captors and conversed in broken English or Hebrew and there were moments of banter as well as heated arguments, but on the whole they stayed quiet, either as a survival mechanism or because they were ordered to.
“They kept shushing the kids. They couldn’t cry or fight, they had to keep quiet so that the neighbours won’t hear us or if any [Israeli] soldiers were to come close. If we would cry, we had to quickly either snap out of it or not show it,” Chen recalled.
At times they were able to listen to Israeli radio and hear news of the world beyond and war around them. One day, by complete chance, they caught an interview with Chen’s father and brother, speaking about them. “Sorry for the loss of Yam and Nadav,” the interviewer concluded. For Chen, it was the final confirmation of their deaths.
Chen, Agam, Gal and Tal were regularly moved, from apartments above ground to tunnels below.
The hostages were taken in the deadly October 7 attacks. Pic: Reuters
‘I only showered once in seven weeks’
“In the tunnels there’s a lot of sand and the sand gets into your mouth and there’s this smell that’s mouldy. It’s very humid there and sometimes there’s a power outage and the fan has to work because there’s not much air,” Chen said.
“At the beginning there was more food. And they tried to supply food because they wanted us to be okay. They kept saying that, you know, they were taking care of us, that they’re protecting us. We understood that we were important to them.
“The conditions in the apartments were not easy. The windows, they would try to open them a bit, but most of the day the windows were closed with these heavy curtains. So as far as air, ventilation, sunlight. We didn’t have much of any of that.
“There’s hardly any running water in the tap, if there was then it wasn’t fresh water. The smell in the toilet was really, really, bad. There were entire days without electricity. When there was running water, you needed to decide who’s going to shower. The kids showered. Throughout those seven weeks, I only showered, once. I wanted the children to shower.”
Pictures of some of the hostages displayed in Tel Aviv. Pic: Reuters
The fighting was often close by, the sound of airstrikes frightening. There were times that Chen worried her family might be killed by Israeli forces – not their captors.
It was the worst when the sun went down and everything went dark.
“There was fierce fighting going on and the apartments next to us, there was [a] blast and they were damaged. Sometimes in the middle of the night, in darkness, they took us out to the street and we were under tremendous danger from our forces as well.
“It was really scary and dangerous. We were really in danger. When they took us out to the street and we walked down the street and we saw the devastation and destruction, it was really hard.
“You’re in the middle of a war, it’s a battlefield. That’s not that I was thinking, ‘oh, good for us, we showed them’. It was terrible. It was terrible to see the destruction, the devastation, the poverty, the children in the streets.”
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About 100 hostages still remain in Gaza. Pic: Reuters
Chen describes seeing weapons everywhere, guns hidden under cushions, grenades and knives.
As the weeks wore on, their guards became increasingly stressed as Israeli forces started closing in.
“We also saw them missing their families. They were worried about their families, their wives. They were hoping for the war to be over. They were hoping for a ceasefire.”
On 26 November, two days into a week-long ceasefire, Chen and her three children were released.
‘It was so humiliating and scary’
“It was like a very long day, a lot of waiting time. We waited in this car for five hours. They said that they were waiting to receive a signal, the phone call from the Red Cross.
“We had to get out of the car and walk and everybody around us, you know, the masses were taking pictures of us. It was so humiliating, humiliating and scary.
“And then when we were passed into the hands of the Red Cross and we started driving away, then the masses clung to the jeep, and somebody even climbed on top of it with this stick next to the driver and kept yelling. And then, like, you know, with the magic wand, all of a sudden the Red Cross jeep stopped.
“And then we were transferred into the hands of the IDF, into armed forces. And it was truly moving and we were both happy and sad because we knew that Nadav and Yam were not waiting for us.”
On Monday, fresh ceasefire talks resumed in Qatar. Hamas has softened its demands but the Israeli government has still described them as “unrealistic” and “delusional”. Chen says a new truce is urgent to get the remaining hostages out, many of whom are badly injured.
“We need to do everything possible in order to release the people who are still there as quickly as possible. We were there towards the end with the young women who were injured physically, some complex wounds, some of them with a severed fingers, with holes in their hands and they did everything they could in order to function and to be okay in a very wrong, distorted reality.
“We need to do everything for them because they’re doing everything they can over there. We need to do everything possible in order to release them, to bring them back to their families, to bring them back to our country.”
It is one of the most notorious and secret places in Iran.
Somewhere foreign journalists are never allowed to visit or film. The prison where dissidents and critics of Iran’s government disappear – some never to be seen again.
But we went there today, invited by Iranian authorities eager to show the damage done there by Israel.
Evin Prison was hit by Israeli airstrikes the day before a ceasefire ended a 12-day war with Iran. The damage is much greater than thought at the time.
We walked through what’s left of its gates, now a mass of rubble and twisted metal, among just a handful of foreign news media allowed in.
A few hundred yards in, we were shown a building Iranians say was the prison’s hospital.
Behind iron bars, every one of the building’s windows had been blown in. Medical equipment and hospital beds had been ripped apart and shredded.
Debris scattered across what Iran says was the prison hospital
It felt eerie being somewhere normally shut off to the outside world.
On the hill above us, untouched by the airstrikes, the buildings where inmates are incarcerated in reportedly horrific conditions, ominous watch towers silhouetted against the sky.
Evin felt rundown and neglected. There was something ineffably sad and oppressive about the atmosphere as we wandered through the compound.
The Iranians had their reasons to bring us here. The authorities say at least 71 people were killed in the air strikes, some of them inmates, but also visiting family members.
Authorities say this building was the visitor centre
Iran says this is evidence that Israel was not just targeting military or nuclear sites but civilian locations too.
But the press visit highlighted the prison’s notoriety too.
Iran’s critics and human rights groups say Evin is synonymous with the brutal oppression of political prisoners and opponents, and its practice of hostage diplomacy too.
British dual nationals, including Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe were held here for years before being released in 2022 in exchange for concessions from the UK.
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Inmates are held in building on a hill above, which has been untouched by airstrikes
Interviewed about the Israeli airstrikes at the time, Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe showed only characteristic empathy with her former fellow inmates. Trapped in their cells, she said they must have been terrified.
The Israelis have not fully explained why they put Evin on their target list, but on the same day, the Israeli military said it was “attacking regime targets and government repression bodies in the heart of Tehran”.
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The locus of their strikes were the prison’s two entrances. If they were trying to enable a jailbreak, they failed. No one is reported to have escaped, several inmates are thought to have died.
The breaches the Israeli missiles made in the jail’s perimeter are being closed again quickly. We filmed as a team of masons worked to shut off the outside world again, brick by brick.
Israeli-backed American contractors guarding aid centres in Gaza are using live ammunition and stun grenades as starving Palestinians scramble for food, an investigation has claimed.
The Associated Press has reported the accounts by two contractors from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), although the organisation has strongly denied the allegations, describing them as “categorically false”.
GHF was established in February to deliver desperately needed aid to people in the besieged enclave, but its work has been heavily criticised by international aid groups.
It has also been subject to intense scrutiny about its operations, which Sky News previously reported are associated with a significant increase in deaths.
AP’s claims, which have not been independently verified by Sky News, came from GHF contractors who spoke on condition of anonymity as they were revealing their employer’s internal operations.
Palestinians are shown scrambling for aid in the footage provided to AP. Pic: AP
They said they were motivated to speak out as they were disturbed by what they considered dangerous practices by security staff who were often heavily armed.
AP reported the contractors had claimed “their colleagues regularly lobbed stun grenades and pepper spray in the direction of the Palestinians” and “bullets were fired in all directions – in the air, into the ground and at times toward the Palestinians, recalling at least one instance where he thought someone had been hit”.
Contractor: ‘Innocent people being hurt’
“There are innocent people being hurt. Badly. Needlessly,” the contractor told AP.
Videos reportedly provided by one contractor show aid sites, located in Israeli military-controlled zones, with hundreds of Palestinians crammed between metal gates, scrambling to reach aid.
In the background, gunfire can be heard, and stun grenades are allegedly fired into crowds.
Footage provided to the AP news agency allegedly shows tear gas being fired at an aid distribution site in Gaza. Pic: AP
The footage does not show who was shooting or what was being shot at, but another video shows contractors in a compound, when bursts of gunfire can be heard. One man is then heard shouting in celebration: “Whoo! Whoo!”.
“I think you hit one,” another says, followed by the comment: “Hell, yeah, boy!”
The contractor who took the video told AP that colleagues were shooting in the direction of Palestinians.
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According to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry and witnesses, several hundred people have been killed and hundreds more wounded since the GHF sites started operating more than a month ago, amid claims by Palestinians of Israeli troops opening fire almost every day at crowds seeking to reach the aid.
In response, Israel’s military says it fires only warning shots and is investigating reports of civilian harm. It denies deliberately shooting at any innocent civilians and says it’s examining how to reduce “friction with the population” in the areas surrounding the distribution centres.
Bursts of gunfire can be heard in the footage as Palestinians run towards aid being distributed. Pic: AP
GHF attacks ‘false claims’
GHF has vehemently denied the accusations, adding that it has investigated AP’s allegations.
In a statement on X, GHF wrote: “Based on time-stamped video footage and sworn witness statements, we have concluded that the claims in the AP’s story are categorically false. At no point were civilians under fire at a GHF distribution site.
“The gunfire heard in the video was confirmed to have originated from the IDF, who was outside the immediate vicinity of the GHF distribution site.
“It was not directed at individuals, and no one was shot or injured. What is most troubling is that the AP refused to share the full video with us prior to publication, despite the seriousness of the allegations.”
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Safe Reach Solutions, the logistics company subcontracted by GHF, told the AP there have been no serious injuries at any of their sites to date.
But the organisation admitted that, in isolated incidents, security professionals fired live rounds into the ground and away from civilians to get their attention.
A Safe Reach Solutions spokesperson told AP this happened at the start of their operations at “the height of desperation where crowd control measures were necessary for the safety and security of civilians”.
Liverpool star Diogo Jota has died in a car crash.
The 28-year-old Portuguese forward died in the accident in the early hours of Thursday morning near Zamora, in northwestern Spain.
His brother, Andre Silva, was also killed in the crash on the Rias Bajas Highway (A-52) near Palacios de Sanabria, heading towards Benavente.
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Jota’s former teammate: ‘This can’t be real’
The site of the accident on the A52
Follow the latest updates following Diogo Jota’s death
Jota and Silva were driving to Santander to catch a ferry back to England ahead of the start of Liverpool’s pre-season training on Monday, CNN Portugal reports.
The news outlet reports that Jota was advised against flying back to England due to recent surgery.
Police said the accident happened at 12.30am when the Lamborghini the pair were travelling in veered off the road.
Palacios de Sanabria in the north of Spain
“A vehicle left the road and everything indicates a tyre burst while overtaking,” the Guardia Civil in Zamora told Sky Sports News in a statement.
“As a result of the accident, the car caught fire and both people were killed. Pending the completion of forensic tests, one of the deceased has been identified as Diogo Jota, a Liverpool FC player, and his brother, Andre Felipe.”
A Spanish government source told the PA news agency that police were investigating the crash as “a possible speeding incident”.
The aftermath of the crash. Pic: AP
Pic: AP
Police added that no other vehicles were involved in the incident.
Pictures of the aftermath of the crash showed debris scattered along the side of the road, including what appeared to be charred parts of the vehicle.
It comes just 10 days after the player married his long-term girlfriend, Rute Cardoso.
Diogo Jota holds the Premier League trophy aloft after the club’s title win in the 2024/25 season. Pic: Reuters
Diogo Jota walks the pitch with his family in 2022.
Pic: PA
He had three children.
The footballer, who played as a striker for Liverpool, began his career in his native Portugal and played at Atletico Madrid in Spain before moving to England.
He joined the Merseyside club from Wolverhampton Wanderers in 2020.
Former Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp with Diogo Jota. Pic: PA
Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo (left) and Diogo Jota (right) during a training session. Pic: PA
Jota played an important role throughout his five years with the Reds, including scoring six times in Liverpool’s recent Premier League-winning season.
He scored a total of 47 times in 123 matches for the club. He also played 49 times for the Portugal national side, scoring 14 times.
Silva, 25, played for Penafiel, a Portuguese second division club.
Diogo Jota holding the trophy on the team bus during the Premier League winners parade in Liverpool. Pic: PA
Teammates and football legends pay tribute
A statement issued by Liverpool FC said the club was “devastated” by their player’s death.
“The club have been informed the 28-year-old has passed away following a road traffic accident in Spain along with his brother, Andre,” the club said in a statement.
“Liverpool FC will be making no further comment at this time and request the privacy of Diogo and Andre’s family, friends, teammates and club staff is respected as they try to come to terms with an unimaginable loss.
“We will continue to provide them with our full support.”
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Sky’s Greg Milam reports from Anfield Stadium where Liverpool fans are hearing about the death of Diogo Jota.
The Portuguese football federation said it was “utterly devastated by the deaths”.
“Far beyond being an exceptional player, with nearly 50 caps for the national team, Diogo Jota was an extraordinary person, respected by all teammates and opponents, someone with a contagious joy and a reference within his own community.
“We have lost two champions. The passing of Diogo and Andre Silva represents irreparable losses for Portuguese Football, and we will do everything to honour their legacy daily.”
The Portugal and Spain women’s teams held a minute’s silence for Jota and Silva before their match in the Women’s Euros in Switzerland on Thursday evening.
Floral tributes left at Anfield this morning. Pic: Sky
It came after Liverpool’s manager Arne Slot said in a statement: “What can anyone say at a time like this when the shock and the pain is so incredibly raw? I wish I had the words but I know I do not.
“All I have are feelings that I know so many people will share about a person and a player we loved dearly and a family we care so much about.
“My first thoughts are not those of a football manager. They are of a father, a son, a brother and an uncle and they belong to the family of Diogo and Andre Silva who have experienced such an unimaginable loss.”
Jota’s former manager at Liverpool, Jurgen Klopp, offered his thoughts in a post on Instagram.
“This is a moment where I struggle! There must be a bigger purpose, but I can’t see it,” he said.
“I’m heartbroken to hear about the passing of Diogo and his brother Andre. Diogo was not only a fantastic player, but also a great friend, a loving and caring husband and father.
“We will miss you so much. All my prayers, thoughts and power to Rute, the kids, the family, the friends and everyone who loved them.”
Liverpool captain Virgil van Dijk posted on Instagram: “What a human being, what a player, but most importantly what an unbelievable family man.
“You mean so much to all of us and you always will!”
Cristiano Ronaldo, Jota’s captain in the national team, said: “It doesn’t make sense. Just now we were together in the National Team, just now you had gotten married.
“To your family, your wife, and your children, I send my condolences and wish them all the strength in the world.
“I know you will always be with them. Rest in Peace, Diogo and Andre. We will all miss you.”
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Diogo Jota married his long-term girlfriend just two weeks ago
Jota’s Liverpool teammates Darwin Nunez, Cody Gakpo and Dominik Szoboszlai have also paid tribute.
Szoboszlai wrote: “Words cannot describe how heartbroken and devastated we are… Your smile, your love for the game will never be forgotten.
“We will miss you so much, but you will stay with us forever, on and off the pitch.”
Jota’s former teammates Trent Alexander-Arnold, Sadio Mane, Roberto Firmino and Thiago Alcantara have also shared messages on social media.
Mane posted a picture of himself and Jota with heartbreak emojis.
It came as Liverpool legend Kenny Dalglish wrote on X: “You feel helpless, knowing there’s so little we can do to ease the pain for his wife of just two weeks, his three beautiful children.”
Liverpool legend Steven Gerrard shared an image of Jota on Instagram and wrote: “Condolences to his family and friends during this incredibly sad time.”
Liverpool owners Billy Hogan, John Henry and Tom Werner, who are part of the Fenway Sports Group, said: “This tragic situation and the reality of it is truly shocking, devastating and has left us numb with grief.”
Football icon Lionel Messi has also paid tribute, sharing an image of Jota on Instagram with the message “QEPD” – short for the Spanish phrase ‘que en paz descanse’, which translates to “may he rest in peace'”.
European football clubs such as Barcelona and AC Milan have also shared messages, along with basketball player LeBron James and tennis icon Rafael Nadal.
Meanwhile Liverpool FC have opened a physical and digital book of condolence for supporters and members of the public to sign.
The physical book is at the club’s stadium, in the Anfield Road Stand reception area until Sunday evening.
An avid video gamer, Jota also owned an eSports team and regularly streamed on Twitch.
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