Underground in a secret location in East London this week, there’s a pop-up exhibition unlike any other. Voices from the Tunnel tries to give a sense of conditions for the roughly 130 hostages still held in Gaza by Hamas, over 100 days since the October 7 attacks.
It’s organised by the UK-based civilian group the 7/10 Human Chain Project, who have kept the location private for security reasons. That means the public cannot visit – instead, politicians, academics, influencers and journalists have been invited in the hope that they will talk about it.
As I enter the ruined building, a guide asks me to close my eyes and count for 100 seconds. The idea is to start to comprehend the length of a seemingly interminable 100 days in captivity. I’m led past a scooter like the one used to take a hostage back to Gaza, and then down into a foreboding dusty basement (a sign explains that the real tunnels are much deeper).
Down there are a series of crude but emotive exhibits, based on factual testimony from the hostages released during the temporary ceasefires late last year. The first are mannequins covered in a bloody sheet and sitting on a chair; supposed to show the violence and torture some of the hostages witnessed, while clothes are strewn on the floor throughout.
The exhibition is populated by mannequins which represent specific hostages: 240 were originally taken. One is Emily Hand, the nine-year-old who was released in November, and whose father Thomas is Irish. When she got free, Emily was extremely thin from eating half a pitta bread each day, and spoke only a whisper: she says she was threatened with being knifed to death if she spoke loudly.
Another mannequin shows a 12-year-old Eitan Yahalomi sitting on a mattress watching television. His aunt claimed that he was forced to watch footage of the October 7 massacre on a loop while in the tunnels. His father remains in captivity.
Video interviews give a sense of the ordeal. Maya Regev, 21, had her leg painfully mangled by a gunshot in the attack. It was repaired badly without anaesthetic while she was in captivity, and had to be reset when she came back.
While the hostages swaps focused on the release of civilians, some remain trapped. There are twelve “zones” in the show, which try to give a sense of daily life for them in the tunnels. There is a mannequin showing a child “celebrating” their birthday – one baby, Kfir Bibas, turned one year old in captivity during the Christmas break, alongside his mother, father and brother.
The final section covers the sexual violence to which Israeli authorities have stated ten hostages say they were subject during their captivity. It has a news article showing four young women in their late teens who are thought to still be underground: Liri Albag, Karina Ariev, Daniela Gilboa, and Agam Berger. The exhibition ends upstairs with a wall featuring posters of the hostages, with calls to “bring them home”.
And yes, behind a carefully monitored door is the infamous 43-minute video of the Hamas attacks, taken from dashcam footage, CCTV, and mobile phones on that awful day. The war crimes on show are horrific. A half-dressed father takes his two young sons to a shelter, but militants throw a grenade inside, killing him. The sons are left weeping, while a fighter helps himself to coca cola from the fridge.
We feel each and every day of those 100 days – we feel it, and it's painful
One militant cuts off the head of an Israeli soldier so his comrades can take pictures of the headless body. Several men shout that they want to be filmed killing Jews. The lifeless bodies of innocent civilians are left strewn across the ground at the Be’im music festival, while open-top pick-up trucks transport some hostages back into Gaza, to be taken to the tunnels. When I visited, former Prime Minister Liz Truss was in the room watching, but left after the first few minutes.
Eylon Keshet, 30, has travelled from Israel to speak at the exhibition. He is a first cousin of the Bibas family. Keshet says he is here to bring attention to the plight of the hostages. “I think that people don't realise that 100 days is not just a number, it’s a very long time” he says. “And we feel each and every day of those 100 days – we feel it, and it's painful”. Keshet says he supports any means necessary for their return. “If a ceasefire is what brings them back, let it be a ceasefire” he says. “I just need my family back and alive as soon as possible.”
With the war ongoing, the exhibition could be thought of as working partly as Israeli propaganda. The first exhibition is a series of beds in hospitals, in order to show that Hamas uses hospitals for cover – claims which have been contested. “The Terrorist Group utilises hospitals, schools, mosques and the like for both cover and operational centres…” reads a caption.
Another text box says that hostages are used as the “ultimate human shields”, and that Hamas moves them around the tunnels “in order to protect themselves”. The exhibition also leaves out the fact that the IDF are known to have killed at least three hostages themselves, even as they were waving white flags. One guide defended the number of civilian deaths, saying it was relatively lower than other wars.
The exhibition also doesn’t make any mention of the Israel Government’s reaction to the taking of hostages, and the bombardment of Gaza. The Palestinian Health Ministry reports that 24,000 Gazans are now dead, including more than 10,000 children. While the exhibition uses the language about a “humanitarian crisis” for the hostages, it doesn’t mention that nearly two million Gazans, 85 per cent of the population, have been displaced as their homes have been flattened, while 93 per cent of the population face crisis levels of hunger.
Co-organiser Orit Eyal-Fibeesh is a Londoner, having moved here from Israel 20 years ago. She says before October 7th, the group used to meet to protest against Benjamin Netanyahu's controversial judicial reforms in Israel. They changed their aims after the Hamas attack to focus on helping the hostages hostages. Because it is a group made up of different voices, the 7/10 project are not making overt political demands.
“I think it would be irresponsible of us to advise the Israeli government on policies,” she says. Eyal-Fibeesh wishes that influential regional powers such as Qatar and Egypt would help apply pressure to release the hostages. She herself wants the war to end.
“Personally, I'm saying ceasefire now and get those people out,” she says, and adds that she thinks that the violence will only lead to more hatred of Israel in the future.
The 7/10 Human Chain Project’s website explains that they are a grassroots group who came together after the October 7th attacks. They state the new exhibition has been funded by private donors and their own money, with no help from the Israeli Government. Inside Voices from the Tunnel is a soldier from the IDF spokesman’s office who mans the video of Hamas atrocities, but organisers say that is independent from the exhibition.
The 7/10 Human Chain Project have also helped create “Stand with Israel” marches in London, and put up posters calling for the hostages to return. Another of their campaigns tries to put pressure on the Red Cross to give more humanitarian support to the hostages – something that the UN have said is almost impossible due to the ongoing war.
The day I visited the exhibition, Hamas released a video of Noa Argamani, who was famously abducted on a scooter from the Be’in music festival. In it, Argamani says that she and two other hostages, Tai Tversky and Yossi Sharabi, were in an area that was hit by an IDF strike, and that the two men had since died.
Earlier videos had Tversky directly appealing to the Israeli President for a ceasefire. “Netanyahu, please stop the war. Bring us home,” he said. Argamani herself had the same message: “Stop this madness and return us to our families.” Details of Hamas’s video, itself released for propaganda reasons, cannot be verified.
Voices from the Tunnel gives a terrible reminder of the awful experience for hostages since October 7th, something that has occasionally been lost in coverage of the war in Gaza. But there is little sense of how the horror might end, and a visit to this East London basement doesn’t give much hope that things will get better any time soon.
