Danielle Aloni, who was kidnapped by Hamas on October 7 along with her 6-year-old daughter Emilia, told her while they were in captivity, “‘I’m sorry, we’re going to die here’” after I covered her with a blanket and held her tight.
A month after her release from captivity in Gaza, Aloni gave an extensive interview on Channel midnight on Saturday. As she was kidnapped, she said she experienced “a feeling of terror that cannot be explained in words. There aren’t words in Hebrew that can describe this kind of terror. They’ll have to invent new words to explain what happened that day.”
“They just took my little girl, Emma. They took a girl from her mother’s hands. I started yelling [in Arabic] La, la! Binti, Binti! La!” (No, no! My daughter, my daughter! No!)
Aloni showed the interviewer how her captor shook his head and wagged his finger at her, then mimicked shooting her daughter, making a gun with his hand and gesturing toward her.
“After i covered my daughter with a blanket, i hugged her tight and i told her.. im sorry but we’re going to die”.Part of Daniel Aloni’s heartbreaking interview to @N12News, i ask you, please watch it, share it and understand this is what so many Hostages went through. pic.twitter.com/2Q6G1dPQuv
— Yaari Cohen (@YaariCohen) January 6, 2024
During her time in Gaza, she was exposed to Hamas’s network of tunnels, encountering the other hostages taken that day, whose wounds remained open and untreated. “When we entered the next tunnel,” she said, “I saw the injuries,” she said, “people that were so wounded, with open wounds, with injured, beaten faces.”
Aloni recalled her daughter calming her down as she suffered through a panic attack. “I screamed, ‘I’m going to die here! I’m going to die here! I’m going to die here!’ Those were the only words that came out. I felt that I was going to die there. My daughter patted my face, ‘Mom, don’t cry, I’m okay, I’m okay.’ Because each time I saw she was in distress, I started to cry, so she comforted me.”
Over 240 Israelis were kidnapped when Hamas invaded southern Israel on October 7, and over 100 have since been released and returned to Israel in prisoner exchanges. It is estimated that around 130 hostages are still held in Gaza.
Reports ran last week of negotiations, in which Hamas would release 40-50 hostages in exchange for a temporary ceasefire. If they existed, they have been frozen following the assassination of senior Hamas commander Saleh al-Arouri in Beirut last Tuesday.