Former hostage Sapir Cohen recounted her experience being kidnapped and subsequently held captive in Gaza in a Saturday interview published on TBN Israel's YouTube channel.
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Cohen was kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7 and spent 55 days in captivity.
When Cohen was hiding from terrorists on a kibbutz with her partner Alex Troufanov, she thought about trying to send messages to her family, but didn’t want to communicate something with the meaning of goodbye, she said.
Cohen had gone to the kibbutz to spend Simchat Torah with Troufanov’s family. Troufanov holds dual Israeli-Russian citizenship and is still held hostage in Gaza, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group has released multiple videos of him in captivity.
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“It was a regular weekend,” Cohen said. “That weekend, Sasha didn’t want to come here. He felt something, and he said, ‘Sapir, I don’t want to go, I don’t know why.’ But I convinced him, and we came here. On Saturday, I woke up at 6 a.m. because of the rockets. It was raining of rockets.” The house the two were staying in didn’t have a shelter, and there wasn’t time to run to Troufanov’s parents’ house, which did have one.
“So we stayed near the walls, I felt maybe the walls could protect us,” Cohen said. “After an hour of rockets, we got a message from his mother, and the message was: There are terrorists in Kibbutz Be’eri.” Troufanov continued receiving messages on his phone and made it clear that they needed to stay silent.
"We hid under the bed, but then I heard ‘Allahu Akbar’"
“We hid under the bed, but then I heard ‘Allahu Akbar,’ I heard hundreds of terrorists come inside, I heard things explode, the screams of the terrorists, the screams of the people killed by them, and I heard them come closer and closer to us. They were shooting everywhere, at everyone,” Cohen said.
Terrorists broke into the house, broke everything, and took them captive. That was the last moment Cohen and Troufanov saw each other, and she didn’t know what happened to him until she returned to Israel.
On the 20-minute motorcycle ride to Gaza, Cohen said various people tried to stop the bike to beat her, and once in Gaza, the streets were filled with thousands of civilians who tried to touch and beat her.
“When you stand in a room like this, you see what happened to the place; it brings to life how much pain people experienced and how much suffering they experienced on that day,” the interviewer Mati Shoshani said as he and Cohen walked through the ruined house of Troufanov’s parents. “For a lot of people, time stopped on that day.”
When asked about her time in captivity, Cohen brought up that for a few months prior to October 7, she began feeling anxiety despite having a good job and being happy with Troufanov but felt that something bad would happen.
“I felt that I was standing in front of a very bad thing, [and] that just God can help me,” she said.
When scrolling through Instagram, Cohen came across an advertisement about a chapter in Psalms 27, which is related to war.
“They wrote there that if you read it for 30 days, you will be healthy, miracles will happen to you,” she said. “I felt that I wanted to pray for the first time in my life. I said it for 30 days, and the last day was October 7.”
Interacting with other hostages in captivity
In Gaza, Cohen saw various other hostages. “I remember that I saw the other hostages, that one of them just laid down and he closed his eyes, he doesn’t want to be a part of this reality,” Cohen said. “I saw a young girl that was shaking, and I saw people that all their families were in the kibbutz on that day and they didn’t know what happened to their children, to their parents.”
“When I saw them, it reminded me [of] my last wish—when I was under the bed—and I’m saying, ‘God, please keep me,’ because I feel that all my life I didn’t do something meaningful,” Cohen added. “And my last chance, I want a last chance to do something meaningful in my life. It’s really bad to be there in captivity; this is the place where I can be the most meaningful person, and I just need to choose that. I just need to choose that I want to help the hostages and I need to choose that I want to continue my life.”
When she decided to take that responsibility, Cohen explained that she felt more power, and she stopped thinking of things outside captivity, only thinking about the moment and how she could help.
“I saw people, after three weeks, who came to my group and got just one pita per day,” Cohen said. “ And I met people after 50 days that they didn’t get to shower or brush their teeth, and they needed to lie down all these days without talking.”
In the interview, Cohen explained how she tried to look for potential connections to make with her captors.
“After you create the connection, you have to be very careful because you don’t want the other terrorist to see that you can get food from one of them, and you don’t want the other terrorist to be against him, because then it will destroy the connection,” she said. “So before every step, you need to think, because every step could be your last one.”
When being led underground into tunnels, a young girl also held hostage approached Cohen and said she didn’t want to go down as it was too scary. The tunnels were dark, moldy, and wet, and full of lice and bedbugs, Cohen explained.
“I said, ‘What do you mean? Of course you want to go there, this is the number one attraction in Gaza,’” Cohen said. “And she told me, ‘Sapir, you are crazy, but maybe I want to be crazy like you.’ So we go to the tunnels, and its a dark place and we were scared, but I kept saying, ‘Wow, it’s a wonderful place.’”
The belief in God helped Cohen in her time as a hostage. “It doesn’t say that I will get everything that I want, and it doesn’t say that I will be happy all the time,” she said. “But it’s promised me just one thing—that behind everything that happened there is purpose. I just thought about that every time. If I need to be in the tunnels, I will be in the tunnels, and I will try to do the best that I can.”