In his first interview since being rescued from Hamas captivity on June 8, Almog Meir Jan told Keshet 12 on Monday about the sadism of his captor, the conditions he was held in, and his message to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Meir Jan was taken hostage by Hamas while attending the Nova music festival on October 7. His last call to his mother was at 7:45 a.m. “There are rockets from all directions, and we are being shot at. I don’t know what’s going on, but I will try to call you every half an hour. Ima, I love you.”
The IDF rescued Meir alongside Noa Argamani, Shlomi Lev, and Andrey Kozlov on June 8.
Describing the moment he was taken hostage, Meir Jan recalled how he was covered, put in a vehicle, and taken to the location where he met Lev and Kozlov.
“The first three days we didn’t even talk. For three days I didn’t know what they looked like because we were blindfolded,” Meir Jan told the interviewer.
The blindfold stayed on for three days, and was only removed when they went to the bathroom or when they ate, he explained. They even drank with the blindfolds on.
“Three days of being scared to death, we didn’t know what was happening.”
Meir Jan recounted his first night in captivity: “I didn’t cry the first night. I slept a lot. I didn’t want to be part of the situation, I wanted to disconnect. I just turned off entirely.”
He described that there were no mattresses on the floor, and aside from being blindfolded, the three men’s feet and hands were tied behind their backs.
After three days, their captors untied the hands and feet and retied them at the front, Meir Jan told the interviewer, leaving the blindfolds off this time.
They remained in this position, bound, for two and a half months.
“When there was the first hostage deal, we were still tied up,” Meir Jan said.
The sadistic captors
In the interview, Meir Jan also described the “sadism” of his captor Abdullah Aljamal, a journalist, known to be the son of the prominent Gaza Aljamal family, which is known to have Hamas connections. The family lives in the same house where the men were kept.
“Shlomi, Andrey, and I could be talking about something and after an hour of talking, he would say: ‘Why are you talking? I told you to be quiet. Each of you to his mattress, no toilet, no this, no that.’”
“He was a control freak.”
“The [Arab guard] who was with us, the main guy, was unstable: a psycho. We didn’t know how he had woken up in the morning or how he had gone to sleep at night,” Meir Jan said. “He could be happy and an hour later he could be shouting, and we were scared to death of the days he was grouchy. The slightest thing could trigger a punishment: tying our arms to a stick, putting a pen in our mouths, covering our mouths. Telling us not to talk or lean on anything. It could be a day, two days, one week”.
Meir Jan described how Aljamal, while he disliked all three hostages, “humiliated Andrey the most,” threatening to bury him in Gaza, toss him to the dogs, or leave him to die.”
Message to the PM
The rescued hostages met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Hashomer hospital following the operation. When asked what he would say to the prime minister now, with a hostage-ceasefire deal on the cards and allegations that the Israeli leader is obstructing a deal, Meir Jan said he’d ask “What do you want? Is your goal, no matter what it is, worth this?”
“Look me in the eyes and tell me if it was worth all of this.”
Meir Jan said that if ending the war was not Netanyahu’s priority, it was because “he didn’t experience this war on his flesh.”
“If he were there, he’d sing a different tune.”