JNS

Freed Israeli-Russian hostage Elizabeth Tsurkov said on Wednesday. Nov 5, that Jerusalem’s assassination campaign targeting top Hezbollah, Hamas and Iranian terrorists contributed to her release from captivity.

Tsurkov, who was held for two and a half years by Iran-backed Kata’ib Hezbollah in Iraq, told The New York Times in an interview published Wednesday that she believes the IDF military campaign “rattled” the terrorist leaders, leading them to view their captive as a liability.

Abuse

The exclusive interview, in which Tsurkov for the first time revealed the details of physical and mental abuse she underwent in captivity, came around eight weeks after the United States and Israel helped secure her release.

After being kidnapped when leaving a central Baghdad coffee shop in March 2023, the Princeton student was beaten and sexually assaulted in the back of an SUV, she told the Times. “They started twisting my pinkie, almost breaking it,” she recalled, adding that resisting was “pointless.”

At first, the kidnappers seemed unaware she was Israeli, and it appeared as if they had abducted her for ransom, she said. However, a month into her captivity, the situation deteriorated when the guards discovered evidence of Tsurkov’s dual Israeli nationality on her smartphone.

The terrorists accused her of being a spy, to which Tsurkov responded by urging them to read her articles and social media posts in support of the Palestinians and criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

When she refused to confess, she was “strung up and tortured.”

Tsurkov said she was beaten, electrocuted, sexually assaulted and forced into positions injuring her back and shoulders, leading her to give fake confessions to stop the torture, inventing plausible stories that would not endanger Iraqis. After Tsurkov’s admission, the terrorists lowered her from a suspension, allowed her to sit, fed her and told her to rest.

However, later that same day, the most senior-ranking captor groped a tattoo on her thigh and threatened her with rape. Her interrogators made such threats but did not follow through on them, she stated.

Asked about her mandatory military service in Israel, she lied that she had served in a hospital, concealing that she had been a low-level soldier in the Military Intelligence Directorate two decades ago.

Two of her jailers, known as Ibrahim and Maher, repeatedly beat her, knocking out one of her teeth, until Tsurkov eventually told the truth.

In July 2023, shortly after the Israeli government issued its first public statement acknowledging that Tsurkov had gone missing in Iraq, she was moved to a different location, to what she and Israeli officials believe was a Kata’ib Hezbollah base close to the Iranian border.

Coded Messages

During the 12-day war between Israel and Iran in June, some airstrikes were close enough to shake the building where she was being held, she said.

Tsurkov was held there in solitary confinement for two years, though the torture subsided at the base, she told The New York Times.

In November 2023, she appeared in a propaganda video that aired on Iraqi television, providing the first public proof that she was still alive.

Tsurkov, who said she was told what to say, said in Hebrew that she had been working for Israel’s Mossad and the CIA when she was kidnapped.

Tsurkov used coded messages to reveal the torture she had endured, she disclosed for the first time to the Times. To convey to Israel that she had been electrocuted, she falsely claimed to have lived in Tel Aviv’s Gan HaHashmal area, “hashmal” being the Hebrew word for electricity.

Credit?

Tsurkov said she also came up with names for her Israeli “handlers” that were wordplay for “torture” in Hebrew, English and Russian, including “Ethan Nuima.” (E. Nuim sounds like “inuim,” Hebrew for torture.)

Tsurkov and her family credited U.S. entrepreneur Mark Savaya, who was tapped as the Trump administration’s special envoy to Iraq in October, as having contributed the most to securing her freedom.

The ex-hostage and two of her siblings said Savaya told them days after her release that he had informed Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani that if she wasn’t freed, the United States would attack Kata’ib Hezbollah. However, Savaya denied making the threat in a statement to the Times.

Tsurkov said she believes she would have died in captivity “if they had not engaged so consistently and with such incredible determination,” referring to Washington’s months-long efforts to secure her release.

U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Sept. 9 that Tsurkov, 38, an Israeli born to Russian parents who grew up in a Jewish community in Judea and Samaria, had been freed.

“I am pleased to report that Elizabeth Tsurkov, a Princeton student, whose sister is an American citizen, was just released by Kata’ib Hezbollah” and is now “safely in the American embassy in Iraq after being tortured for many months,” the president wrote on Truth Social.

Tsurkov, who is Jewish, was taken captive by the Iranian-backed Iraqi Shi’ite militia Kata’ib Hezbollah (“The Battalions of the Party of God”) while doing research in Baghdad for her doctoral dissertation.

Netanyahu in a statement following Tsurkov’s release highlighted the assistance of various individuals, particularly Trump, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Adam Boehler, the U.S. special envoy for hostage affairs, and IDF Gen. (res.) Gal Hirsch, Israel’s hostages coordinator.