Aviva and Keith Siegel, kidnapped together from Kibbutz Kfar Aza on October 7, 2023, have described witnessing the sexual assault and beating of fellow female hostages during their time in Hamas captivity in a recent interview with the Daily Mail.
Aviva, 65, said she still carries the memory of women returning from assaults by their captors. "I'm a witness of all of the girls who were beaten up into pieces," she said. She recalled one girl coming back from an assault so badly bruised that, in Aviva's words, "she was purple; I wanted to die." She added, "That was one of the hardest moments: knowing what was happening to the young girls." The young female hostages Aviva was with were forced by Hamas captors to wear ill-fitting clothing and shower naked in front of guards, with one guard entering the bathroom and forcing a girl to perform oral sex.
Keith, 67, was held for 484 days before his release, while Aviva was released after 51 days. Nearly three years after the attack, both say they remain haunted by what they experienced underground. Keith told the outlet he still showers compulsively, believing he remains marked by the tunnels' filth. Aviva published a memoir about her captivity, titled "The Main Thing is to Wake up to a New Morning," in March, following her release in November 2023.
The couple's kidnapping unfolded on the morning of October 7, when Hamas terrorists broke into their safe room. "They pulled us violently, brutally, out of the safe room, into our living room, and we were surrounded by between ten and 15 terrorists, screaming at each other and screaming at us," Keith said. During the abduction, Keith's ribs were broken, Aviva's knee was torn, and Keith was shot in the arm before the couple was forced into a vehicle at knifepoint and gunpoint.
Once in Gaza, Aviva feared she would witness Keith's death by suffocation in the tunnels. She described a moment when Keith said he could not breathe: "I said to him, 'Just lie down and try and breathe.' And while he lay down, I was scared to look at Keith, dead. I remember saying to myself, 'Just don't look at him, because you don't want to see him dead.'"
According to the Daily Mail, Aviva said she learned to dissociate from her surroundings to cope with what she witnessed, including the abuse of other hostages and Keith's starvation. "Because to see the girls being beaten, or Keith being threatened, or Keith being starved... I wanted to die. I just wanted to die," she said.
The couple testified before the United Nations Committee against Torture in Geneva in November 2024. Keith told the panel: "Our captors compared the intimate parts of myself and another hostage, threatened us with knives, leaving us to beg to go to the bathroom." He said he was "denied the most basic of human rights. I was starved and denied water. More than once, young terrorists forced me to strip in front of them and shaved my body."
Aviva told the UN panel that a 16-year-old hostage who had never shown her body to anyone was sexually assaulted by a guard. "The Hamas terrorist just stood there and stared at her and smiled. I remember looking at her while she came out of there. She was shocked, I was shocked. So many minutes of being shocked," she said.
Keith told the Daily Mail that conditions worsened after the November 2023 truce collapsed on December 1. "Then the terrorists became even more cruel, more violent, and the treatment was much worse," he said, describing being spat on and kicked by a guard while lying on the floor. Keith lost roughly 35 kilograms (77 pounds) in captivity, while Aviva lost about 10 kilograms (22 pounds); "They didn't care," Aviva said, adding that their captors gained weight eating in front of the hostages.
Hamas released Aviva after 51 days as part of a ceasefire deal brokered by Qatar and the US, alongside 13 other Israeli hostages and three foreign nationals. Keith remained captive for over a year longer, moved between roughly 30 locations, and encountered some 60 different captors, including six months in total isolation.
The Daily Mail reported that Keith attempted to learn Arabic and thank his guards for food or bathroom access as a survival strategy. One guard tricked him into reciting the Islamic declaration of faith. "He said the word, I said the word. He said the word, I said the word, and then he said: 'Okay, now you're a Muslim,'" Keith recalled. He said he responded, "No, I'm not a Muslim, I'm a Jew."
Over his 484 days in Gaza, Keith said he had roughly 25 opportunities to rinse himself with "a bucket of water and a cup." At one point, he was held in a tunnel with a fellow hostage and three terrorists, sharing a single toilet that could be flushed only once a day. "I don't want to get too graphic about how disgusting it was. I just tried not to go to the toilet as much as I could," he said. He described avoiding bathroom requests at night out of fear of provoking his captors: "If you need to go to the toilet in the middle of the night, you don't want to agitate them or get them angry, because then they'll take their agitation and anger out on me. So I'm just holding on until I feel like I can't hold on any longer." By the end of his nearly 500 days in captivity, Keith said he feared he was too weak to crawl out of the tunnels.
Keith was released on February 1, 2025, handed to the Red Cross and then to IDF forces, as part of the first phase of a ceasefire and hostage-release agreement. He was reunited with Aviva and their four children. The family has not returned to Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where 64 residents were killed and 19 taken hostage on October 7 out of a community of 950. Aviva, a kindergarten teacher for 40 years before the attack, said many of the dead were children she had cared for. "We lost our community. We lost that home... When I'm sitting in this house, it's a home, it's got walls, but I'm not there yet," she said.
