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.”
Hundreds of police are hunting armed men who attacked a prison van in France – with a convict reportedly nicknamed “The Fly” escaping.
Two male prison officers were shot dead and three others seriously injured during the ambush on a motorway in Incarville, northwest France, at around 9am.
Eric Dupond-Moretti, France’s justice minister, said one of the officers leaves behind a wife who was five months pregnant, while the other was a 21-year-old father-of-two.
He said two of those injured are in a critical condition after Tuesday’s ambush.
The officers were transporting convict Mohamed Amra, 30, when they came under heavy fire, said the Paris prosecutor’s office.
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CCTV shows car smash into prison van
Footage shows a black car driving into the front of a white van, and later two armed men patrolling near a tollbooth on the A154 motorway.
Several men used two vehicles to target the van – with one later found burnt-out, a police source told French news agency AFP.
Mohamed Amra’s nickname is said to be ‘The Fly’, according to French media
Amra had been serving an 18-month sentence for “aggravated thefts” in the suburbs of Evreux, northwest France, according to BFM TV.
The French broadcaster said his nickname is “The Fly”.
Police sources also said Amra was involved in drug dealing, suspected of ordering a murder in Marseille, and had ties to the city’s powerful “Blacks” gang.
He had reportedly appeared before a judge in Rouen on Tuesday morning, accused of attempted homicide.
The attack on the van took place while he was being transported back to prison in Evreux, according to reports in France.
Footage shows the aftermath of a collision
A prison source told Le Parisien that the escaped inmate had tried to saw the bars off his cell two days ago.
He had reportedly been placed in solitary confinement and his surveillance level raised after the escape attempt.
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Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said Amra was a “particularly monitored detainee” while in prison.
Gerald Darmanin, France’s interior minister, said “several hundred police officers” had been deployed to “find these criminals”.
French President Emmanuel Macron wrote on X: “This morning’s attack, which cost the lives of prison officers, is a shock to us all.
“The Nation stands alongside the families, the injured and their colleagues.
“Everything is being done to find the perpetrators of this crime so that justice can be done in the name of the French people. We will be intractable.”
“Everything, I mean everything, will be done to find the perpetrators of this despicable crime,” added justice minister Eric Dupond-Moretti.
“These are people for whom life weighs nothing. They will be arrested, they will be judged, and they will be punished according to the crime they committed.”
World
Georgia: Protesters and riot police face off outside Tbilisi parliament after divisive ‘foreign agents’ bill passes
Protesters have smashed barriers at Georgia’s parliament after it approved a divisive “foreign agents” bill.
Riot police used tear gas and sprayed crowds with water cannon as they entered the grounds of the Georgian parliament in the capital Tbilisi.
Sky’s international affairs editor Dominic Waghorn, who is covering the protests in Tbilisi, said there was a “febrile atmosphere” and a “real sense anger, frustration and massive disappointment” that MPs voted for the bill.
Follow live: Riot police move in on Georgia protesters
Hundreds of law enforcement officers guarded parliament. Pic: Reuters
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Protesters break through parliament barricades
The legislation is seen by some as threatening press and civic freedoms and there are concerns it’s modelled on laws used by President Vladimir Putin in neighbouring Russia.
The proposed law would require media and non-governmental organisations and other non-profit groups to register as “pursuing the interests of a foreign power” if they receive more than 20% of funding from abroad.
Demonstrations have engulfed Georgia for weeks ahead of the bill’s final reading on Tuesday.
Police used a spray to keep back the crowds. Pic: AP
Pic: David Mdzinarishvili/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Critics also see it as a threat to the country’s aspirations to join the European Union.
The bill is nearly identical to one that the governing Georgian Dream party was pressured to withdraw last year after street protests.
Pic: Reuters
Authorities were seen detaining protesters near the parliament building. Pic: Reuters
Opponents have denounced the bill as “the Russian law” because Moscow uses similar legislation to stigmatise independent news media and organisations critical of the Kremlin.
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A brawl erupted in the parliament as MPs were debating the bill on Tuesday.
Georgian Dream MP Dimitry Samkharadze was seen charging towards Levan Khabeishvili, the chairman of main opposition party United National Movement, after Mr Khabeishvili accused him of organising mobs to beat up opposition supporters.
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Fighting in Georgia’s parliament
‘Absolutely insane’
Former Georgian president Giorgi Margvelashvili called the bill a “joke” and a “replica” of one introduced by Vladimir Putin to “control his own society” in Russia.
He said the Georgian people would “not fall under that mistake” and that protesters were standing “firm, calm, peaceful and for freedom”.
“We will not let them prevail. We will overcome,” he told Sky News.
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Protesters angry after ‘Russian law’ passes
A protester said it was “absolutely insane that a country like Georgia has accepted this bill as it’s a complete violation for our future”.
The medical student said the bill “makes us more far away from Europe and the rest of the world”, while bringing Georgia closer to the Russian government.
Another protester outside parliament said: “Our government is a Russian government, we don’t want Russia, Russia is never the way, I’m Georgian and therefore I am European.”
One demonstrator said they had been trying to protest “peacefully” but were now “feeling anger, pain and disappointment that again in our history there is a government that goes against our wishes”.
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The president of the European Parliament has shown support for the Georgian people in a post on social media.
“Tbilisi, we hear you! We see you!” Roberta Metsola said.
Alex Scrivener, director of the Democratic Security Institute, said there was time for the law to be turned around.
He told Sky News: “The law passing isn’t the end of the vote.
“The president of Georgia who is aligned with the protesters can veto legislation and that buys us time.”
Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili has said she will veto it but her decision can be overridden by another vote in parliament, controlled by the ruling party and its allies.
Two prison officers have been killed after an attack on a convoy carrying an inmate – with the convict reportedly on the run.
Three other people are seriously injured after the reported “ramming car attack” on a motorway in Incarville in the northwestern France region of Eure.
Footage from the scene shows two hooded men with firearms and a prison van which appears to have been in a collision with a black vehicle.
Several men used two vehicles to target the convoy, a police source has told the French news agency AFP.
The escaped detainee is a man named Mohamed who was convicted of “burglary theft” and is nicknamed “The Fly”, according to Le Parisien.
He had appeared before a judge in Rouen this morning accused of attempted homicide, BFM TV reports.
The attack on the prison van took place while he was being transported back to prison in Evreux, the French broadcaster adds.
The escaped prisoner fled with those who attacked the convoy on Tuesday, Le Parisien reports.
One of the vehicles used to target the convoy was found burned-out in a location which was not specified by the police source who spoke to AFP.
The prison convoy was targeted at a tollbooth on the A154 motorway at about 11am local time, according to reports.
French justice minister Eric Dupond-Moretti posted on X: “A prison convoy was attacked in Eure. Two of our prison officers have died, three are seriously injured.
“All my thoughts are with the victims, their families and their colleagues.”
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