A former Israeli hostage has described how he pleaded with his captors to shoot him after being taken into Gaza, before enduring starvation and beatings to emerge from 505 days in captivity.
Eliya Cohen told an audience at the Nova Exhibition in London on Tuesday evening about the moment he was snatched from the Nova festival in southern Israel and taken back into the Palestinian enclave during the Hamas-led incursion on 7 October 2023.
Mr Cohen was left to believe that his long-term partner Ziv Abud had been killed in the massacre - and only found out the truth on his eventual release in February last year. The couple had hidden under corpses in a bomb shelter on the morning of the brutal attack, but Mr Cohen was discovered by Hamas.
After being threatened and hauled into Gaza on the back of a pickup truck, he said he and other captives were attacked by locals and that he asked his captors to shoot him.
“I remember one guy trying to pull me out, threatened my life, and I looked at the terrorist and I told myself, ‘If I’m going to die, I want to choose how I die’ ... so I looked at the terrorist and I told him, ‘shoot me, just kill me, shoot me’.”
Mr Cohen said that while his Hamas captors tried to keep him and his fellow hostages alive to use as leverage, they were told that “outside, everyone wants to kill you” and if the IDF attempted to rescue them, they would be “shot in the head”.
Still wearing a plastic leg cast and using a crutch, Mr Cohen recalled the harrowing ordeal of being treated without painkillers for a gunshot wound sustained during the initial attacks after reaching Gaza.
He said his doctor gave him a wet towel to put in his mouth to stop him from screaming during surgery on his leg.
The doctor told him he had no painkillers but warned that “you can’t scream and you can’t talk, because if someone outside realises you are here, they will kill all of us”.
Mr Cohen described being moved around to several locations incognito, including an underground tunnel where he was chained to other hostages and fed a daily ration of pita bread to share between four.
He was among 43 people taken from the festival that morning, of a total of 251 captured during the 7 October attacks. Around 1,200 people were killed, according to local police, including 364 shot, bludgeoned or burned to death at the festival. In response, Israeli forces killed an estimated 71,000 people in Gaza and razed most of the enclave to the ground before a shaky ceasefire in January 2025.
While many of the Israeli hostages ultimately returned home to their loved ones in prisoner swaps, dozens died while in captivity. Survivors have recounted gruelling conditions held in tunnels underground while Israel bombed Gaza overhead.
“We were allowed to use the restroom just once a day,” Mr Cohen said of one underground safe house. “They put LED in the wall because they didn’t want us to go to sleep.
“Every week they came, they beat us. The violence was hard. You know what? I could deal with everything... but nothing prepared us to deal with starvation.”
He said he managed to keep faith by withholding some of the bread to mark the Friday night Sabbath, and thought of his family, whom he wanted to give strength as they awaited his return.
It was his family he feared for when he thought of trying to mount an escape in the beginning. Mr Cohen did not know the full scale of the attacks and resulting conflict while held in captivity.
Speaking to an audience in English, Mr Cohen said he learnt the language from scratch from a book and by practising conversation while passing the time in Gaza.
He said his captors also came to speak to them, but always reminded them that they would shoot them in the head if there were any attempt at a rescue.
Mr Cohen was eventually released on 22 February 2025, and learnt only then that his partner had survived the initial attacks and been campaigning to raise awareness of his plight.
He said on Tuesday the couple were engaged to be married, to a round of applause.
The Nova Exhibition describes itself as a “non-profit, fully immersive experience that recreates the events of 7 October 2023 at The Nova Music Festival”.
Directed by artist Reut Feingold, the exhibition premiered in Tel Aviv in December 2023 and has since travelled the world, stopping in the US, Canada, Argentina and Berlin.
The six-week run in London, which ends on 5 July, is its eleventh stop and the UK’s first.
Tickets are available from £18 at novaexhibition.com. Net proceeds from ticket sales and all further donations go directly to The Tribe of Nova Foundation.
