‘You will stay with me and have my children’

A young Israeli woman who was held hostage for almost two months by Hamas revealed that her kidnapper proposed to her and told her they would have children. Noga Weiss, 18, was at her parents’ home in Kibbutz Be’eri when the extremist group invaded the community in the early hours of October 7.

She revealed to local TV Chanel 12 that about two weeks after being taken from her parents’ house, she received the order.

“He gave me a ring on the 14th [no cativeiro] and I stayed with him until the 50th. He told me: ‘Everyone will be released, but you will stay here with me and have my children'”, he recalled.

When asked if she responded to the request, she claims she laughed so the kidnapper wouldn’t shoot her in the head.

After several days in captivity, the man sent for Noga’s mother so that she could approve the marriage.

“I thought she had been murdered, I thought she was alone. Suddenly, she is alive and I am not alone,” said the young woman about the first time she saw her mother, Shiri Weiss, 53 years old.

The woman shouted at the kidnapper until he understood that the proposal had been refused by her. The young woman spent 50 days under the gun of Hamas, and said that the members changed their mood quickly. At times, they laughed with the victims, at others, they threatened them with weapons. “You always had to please them”, reinforces the young woman.

“I spent 50 days, 24/7, thinking that they would get tired of me and just shoot me or that they wouldn’t need me in the end, or that they would shoot us while we slept in the middle of the night “, he recalls.

The day of the kidnapping

Shortly before Noga was kidnapped, her father, Ilan Weiss, 56, had left home at 7:15 a.m. to join the Kibbutz emergency squad. They later learned that he was killed and that Hamas is holding his remains in Gaza, according to the Times of Israel.

Noga and his mother were at home, trying to protect themselves in a ‘safe room’, but when the group arrived at the room, they shot at least 40 times at the door.

“We saw the conversations on WhatsApp and understood what was happening. People wrote that their house was on fire and then stopped responding”, reported the young woman.

She hid under a bed and saw her mother being taken away by the kidnappers. Shortly afterwards, she heard gunshots and thought her mother might be dead.

The young woman’s older sisters, Meytal, 26, and Ma’ayan, 23, lived in student apartments in a different part of the Kibbutz. The two sent her messages throughout the day, asking her to leave her parents’ house, as the property had caught fire.

Initially, Noga tried to hide in nearby bushes, but was quickly located by Hamas members.

“Something around 40 of them surrounded me. They tied my hands behind my back. As they were taking me, I saw the bodies of people I knew from the Kibbutz. A few minutes later, they put me in a car and started driving,” he recalls.

Both the mother and the young woman were released on November 25th.

“On the day of my release, seeing soldiers in Israel Forces uniforms was the first time [desde 7 de outubro] that I felt safe, so that changed something,” she said.