Aviva Siegel, a former hostage and the wife of American-Israeli hostage Keith Siegel, said Tuesday that she had witnessed and experienced torture by the Hamas terrorists who abducted her and roughly 250 other Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023.
Siegel, 63, spoke with Marc Beckman of the Some Future Day podcast about her experiences. She was released in an eight-day truce last November — one that Hamas later broke — but Keith remains behind, one of the “American Seven” who are still in Gaza, three of whom are thought to be alive.
Siegel was born in South Africa and moved to Israel when she was a child. She met Siegel when he was a student from North Carolina visiting Israel. He remained in Israel after they fell in love, and the two of them eventually settled on a communal farm in southern Israel, Kibbutz Kfar Aza.
Siegel recalled how the terrorists invaded their bomb shelter on October 7 after shooting and wounding Keith, her husband of 43 years. They broke his ribs in the process of abducting him, and took the couple to Gaza in Keith’s car.
In Gaza, they were met by crowds of civilians — including women and children — who cheered the terrorists bringing hostages from Israel. They were forced into a tunnel, where they were later joined by other hostages, many wounded. They would be moved from one location to another 13 times before Aviva was freed. In one tunnel, she said, she was convinced that they would die for lack of oxygen. They were denied food and water for whole days at a time, she said.
At one point, she personally witnessed a Hamas terrorist molesting one of the female Israeli hostages. She was later told that the molestation was frequent, though rarely in the open. Another time, several Hamas terrorists bound a female hostage and beat her brutally. When the young girl returned, wounded and crying, Siegel asked her why she had not screamed. She replied that she had not wanted to give the terrorists the satisfaction of hearing her screaming.
She and Keith had promised to remain strong for each other, and she hoped to see him again. The suffering they endured was so intense from the first moments, she said, that anyone who understood it would not have allowed them to be held in Gaza at all. She said that while she was hopeful that President-elect Donald Trump could bring the hostages home, she did not want to stop urging President Joe Biden to do the same: January 20 might be too late.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
