Couple declares love amidst the grenades

For the 505 days that Eliya Cohen was in Hamas captivity in Gaza, he believed that his fiancée, Ziv Abud, had been murdered at the Nova festival when they were last together.

He discovered that she was alive on his release, and the joy and love these two share was on full display as they spoke to the South African Jewish community at Sandton Shul on Monday, 31 March.

Cohen and Abud, as well as rescued hostage Almog Meir Jan, were brought to South Africa by Jewish National Fund South Africa and The Base Shul to share their stories of surviving the terror of Hamas and get some relaxing time out.

The couple decided to go to the Nova festival two hours before the massacre started, bringing with them Abud’s nephew, Amit Ben Avida, and his girlfriend, Karin Shwarcman. After the music stopped at 06:30 and the rockets started flying above them, they rushed to get to their car to get out of danger.

They made a snap decision to seek shelter, believing it would be safer. They found a small, one square metre shelter near the festival site. “The shelter is designed to only hold 10 people, but 29 people were squeezed into the small space,” Abud said.

“The last guy in the shelter was a commander, and he told us that all his friends were fighting terrorists in Israel,” she said, “This was the first time we understood that terrorists were in Israel, and we were part of a terror attack.”

About 40 terrorists with weapons, guns, and rocket-propelled grenades arrived at the shelter in two vans with the clear purpose of killing everyone inside, Abud said.

“This is the moment that I looked at Eliya, we said we loved each other, and he jumped on me, and I was hiding behind him and hugging him,” she said.

The terrorists threw nine grenades in and around the shelter. After the ninth grenade, Abud felt Cohen’s hand slip out of hers. Abud lost consciousness, and heard Cohen screaming and found that he had been shot in the leg.

“They got inside and started shooting. They shot 35 bullets inside a small shelter with 29 people. And then I don’t remember anything. I woke up and I was in a pile of body parts. The first people I saw were the bodies of Amit and Karin.”

Abud recalled having a panic attack when she realised that her nephew and his girlfriend had been murdered and she couldn’t see her fiancé. She said one of the survivors in the shelter took her hand and told her to be quiet, as there were still terrorists around them. She kept looking for a sign of what had happened to Cohen, but found nothing.

Later that night, she saw a screenshot of a picture of Cohen covered in blood from a Telegram channel, and realised that he had been kidnapped.

“I knew I had to fight for him. I didn’t even think about what had happened to me or Amit. I just fought for Eliya for 505 days until the moment that he was released,” she said.

After seeing the release of Ohad Ben Ami, Eli Sharabi, and Or Levy, just two weeks before Cohen was released, and how thin they were, her fear ramped up. “I was afraid of what I was going to get back,” she said.

Cohen told how on 7 October 2023 after being dragged into Gaza, he managed to escape the bloodlust of terrorists and civilians in and outside a Gazan hospital, where everyone was trying to kill him. He was then taken to a civilian home with children, where he spent 42 days in captivity with no water, no food, and a lack of hygiene.

He was then moved to a terror tunnel and placed alongside Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Almog Sarusi, and Master Sergeant Ori Danino, and all of them were chained. “They tied us to each other. They didn’t let us go to the shower or pee or something like that. After 39 days, we went to the toilet, because the day before, some terrorists gave us food from the bin, from the trash, and we all got sick.”

The tunnel was under a mosque and a school, and the terrorists warned them every time the Israeli forces got close to their location that they would kill them.

Cohen was held in a tunnel with Alon Ohel, Eli Sharabi, and Or Levy over the next 14 months. Ohel is still being held hostage. There, he said they were tortured and abused, given almost no food or water, and even had their clothes taken away from them.

Cohen said that right before he was released, he was put in a tunnel filled with bugs and mice. It was only after 505 days on his release that he was told that his fiancée had survived the Nova massacre. When he heard that, it was “the best day in my whole life”, he told the South African audience.

Twenty-two-year-old Almog Meir Jan was kidnapped from the Nova festival and kept in Hamas captivity for 246 days before being rescued by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Operation Arnon on 8 June 2024.

Meir Jan went to the Nova festival to celebrate finishing his army service, and was about to start a new job when he was kidnapped on 7 October. He said that when he was first taken to Gaza, his extremities were chained and his eyes covered, and he was given no food or water. Over 80 days, he was moved to seven different apartments.

“I told myself that every passing day was a day until I could leave Gaza and go home,” he said. “I remember a lot of nights that I couldn’t sleep because of the sound of the rockets and shooting outside. A lot of times, the terrorists inside the house were already organised because they told us that the Israeli army was 200m from us and they needed to go to battle.”

The terrorists would force them to watch the news and see how many Israeli soldiers were being killed, he said, and tell them that Israel was a weak country.

On the day of his rescue, he went about it just like any other day, Meir Jan said, but by 10:00, he heard rockets and shooting that seemed nearby. “Two minutes later, it felt like the building was shaking.”

The seconds in which IDF soldiers entered the building and rescued him were the first time that he felt that he was safe, he said.