The father of a 12-year-old girl who was held hostage in Gaza for 50 days has said she sometimes wakes in the night screaming and will not let him out of her sight.
Hen Avigdori’s daughter Noam and wife, Sharon, were held with other relatives in a single room in Gaza after being abducted from the Be’eri kibbutz on 7 October.
Avigdori, an Israeli television comedy writer, said Sharon, 52, and Noam returned home “fine physically and emotionally” after being released on 25 November, the second day of the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas.
But he added: “Noam, my 12-year-old daughter, doesn’t allow me to leave the house. I just asked her can I [take] the trash down, and she wouldn’t permit it, so she’s hanging on to me very closely. She has woken sometimes during the night screaming but generally they’re in a good state. She’s processing everything. She’s a very smart, bright young lady.”
Avigdori was speaking at a press conference in which it was heard that children held hostage in Gaza had returned home traumatised, malnourished and with skin rashes and head lice.
Moran Aloni’s older sister Danielle Aloni, 45, and her five-year-old daughter, Emilia, were held captive for 49 days after being abducted from the Nir Oz kibbutz on what some in Israel now refer to as Black Saturday.
Aloni’s younger sister, Sharon Aloni Cunio, 34, was also kidnapped along with her three-year-old twin daughters, Emma and Yuli, before being released on 27 November. He said: “My sister’s [Sharon’s] daughters, Emma and Yuli, are waking up crying, they aren’t able to sleep most nights. Fortunately, they are able to smile now and then.
“My sister Danielle’s daughter, Emilia, is not allowing her to [go anywhere] without her, nowhere, even if it’s for the bathroom or just a room upstairs in my parents’ home.”
Aloni said Hamas had ripped the families apart, taking Sharon Aloni Cunio’s husband, David, to a new location before she and the twins were released. He said the family had been held in “terrible conditions” in a “very, very small room” with more than 10 people.
He said Danielle and Emilia were held separately, moved around and forced to speak in whispers at one place. “In a different location they were at, food was not a given. They weren’t sure when they would be given food or how much. I understood that there were arguments between the hostages around water,” Aloni said.
Dr Yael Mozer Glassberg, a senior physician caring for the children who have been released at Schneider Children’s Medical Center, said all hostages had lost 10-15% of their body weight. She said hostages told how food was scarce and provided on an irregular basis. She added that one family said they were given a cup of tea and a biscuit at 10am and then a portion of rice at 5pm.
Glassberg said some children had not been able to shower for seven weeks and that “terrible, terrible” hygiene conditions had left them with skin rashes and lice.
“I’ve never seen in my life this amount of lice and there were lice bites on the body, all over,” she said. “I’d never imagined in my life as a doctor I would do head treatments of lice for kids, and I did it with love and I cried, and in five or six treatments, we didn’t finish with them [the lice]. And we had wounds that were not disinfected for days so they were infected.”
She said Hamas also inflicted “psychological terror” on the children. “Every family that we were talking to, they were psychologically abused in a terrible way from [being told]: ‘Nobody cares for you. Nobody will look for you.’
“One of the teenagers, they told him every day, several times a day, that ‘don’t worry, you will be here at least for a year, if you go back at all’. And when you’re alone as a teenager without your parents you believe that.”
She added: “The psychological terror was terrible. It’s unfair to say they came back with more or less good physical condition. No, they didn’t.”
