Qaid Farhan Alkadi, a Bedouin abducted by Hamas on October 7 who was rescued from the Gaza Strip last week, told Channel 12 that he was shot by the invading terrorists for refusing to tell them “where the Israeli Jews were.”
“We grew up this way,” Alkadi said, explaining why he refused to shared information with the terrorists.
“Hamas saw I was really a Muslim,” he said, explaining they tested his knowledge of Islam and his Arabic. “They said: ‘Take us in your car and show us where the Jews are.’ I said, It’s Saturday, I’m working. No one is here. No one is here. I played dumb, [so] even if they killed me, I wasn’t ready to do it (to help Hamas).”
The 52-year-old father of 11 was working as a security guard near Kibbutz Magen when Hamas invaded. His brother called to warn him of invading terrorists, and when he went outside to check on things, he said he saw “100 meters from me three Hamas terrorists shooting in my direction and running towards me. I threw down the phone and raised my hands.”
“One of them hit me with his weapon,” Alkadi said. “The other kicked me with his foot. They knocked me to the floor and tied my hands. A foreign worker passed by, and they shot him right next to me.”
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“To them, I’m more of an enemy than the Jewish Israelis,” he said, telling the interviewer, “We are one family, one people. No one can take this from us.”
Medical abuse in Hamas captivity
Alkadi said that he had been left disabled after Hamas’s assault. When first abducted, Alkadi explained the terrorists took him to Nasar Hospital in Khan Yunis, where he was mistreated.
“Look, here goes our dog,” Gazans had reportedly said as Alkadi entered the medical facility, where he was later operated on without anesthetic.
“There were a lot of people there, and you could see their joy. They felt they had won,” the former hostage recalled.
It was during this stay at this hospital that Alkadi met 86-year-old hostage Aryeh Zalmanovich, who was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz.
“He was wounded in the head and hand,” Alkadi said. “Eighty-five years old, with diabetes, just wiped out. He said to me, ‘I’m telling you, it’s not worthwhile being old.'”
The pair became fast friends as they spent a month and a half sharing a hospital room.
“He was lying in bed, and I was next to him on a chair, and he would tell me stories,” Alkadi told Channel 12. “He had a granddaughter that he loved very much and two sons who live in the north. At every opportunity, he would talk about them.”
The pair were shortly separated as Alkadi was placed with abducted foreign workers and Zalmanovich with a Jewish family. After being reunited, Alkadi said that his friend stopped eating and speaking and was placed on an infusion.
When Zalmanovich started to speak again, he started to say his goodbyes, Alkadi recounted.
“I got up and came near. He said, ‘Goodbye to the kibbutz. Goodbye to my friends. Goodbye to my granddaughter.’ It tore me apart. I tried to talk to him, call him, ‘Aryeh, Aryeh…’ Nothing, he doesn’t hear. And then it’s all over.
“It was a very difficult parting. Suddenly, you have an Israeli with whom you talk and spend time in captivity. You feel that he is a brother, a family, father, everything,” Alkadi said.
Terrorists left Alkadi with the body of Zalmanovich for hours before they started filming him and orchestrating his words, he said. The terrorists told him to say that Zalmanovich had been sick and that Hamas tried to save him.
Asked how he occupied himself, he said, “Sleep, wake, and talk to God. I believe. I found a Koran there and 12 to 14 hours a day I read the Koran. I said to myself that if, as a Muslim, I receive such treatment, what about the Jews? What kind of treatment do they receive?”