Caption: Released hostage Ofir Engel being filmed at Kibbutz Be’eri for the “Survived to Tell-Be the Witness VR project, January 2024. Photo courtesy of the Survived to Tell-Be the Witness.
JNS
“There are always noises or smells that take you back there. I just wait until it passes,” Ofir Engel told JNS. Engel, 19, was kidnapped from Kibbutz Be’eri on Oct. 7, 2023, while he was spending the holiday of Simchat Torah at his girlfriend Yuval Sharabi’s family home.
At 6:30 a.m. on that Shabbat—when they were awoken by rocket alerts—Engel, Yuval, her parents, two sisters and the family dog rushed to the safe room to wait for the all-clear. “But the [sirens] didn’t stop,” Engel said. “After two-and-a-half hours, friends started sending scary messages about hearing terrorists outside their houses and pleading for the army to arrive.”
One girl wrote that terrorists had shot her mother and that there was “nothing she could do,” he recounted.
Engel said that as time passed, he began to realize that the attack was much more serious than he had thought.
Recalling the sequence of events, he said, “After six hours, we heard a large ‘boom’ coming from the entrance to the house. We heard terrorists roaming around inside while we were still all in the safe room. A few minutes later, they tried opening the door to the room. Yuval’s dad, Yossi, was holding it closed. But he wasn’t able to overcome the three terrorists who pushed it open.”
Engel continued, “They entered armed. The first thing they did was shoot Yuval’s dog. They then pointed their guns at us. They made us sit outside on the grass with the neighbors, the Shani family. Smoke was everywhere, as was the smell of gunpowder.”
Animals At A Zoo
After moving both families to another part of the kibbutz, the terrorists took them to the road where a small, old, black car was waiting.
“They put Yuval’s father inside. Yuval and I were holding hands. At first, they put us both inside, but then they signaled to her to get out. They put Amit Shani, the young son of the neighbor, inside instead, and we drove away, speeding like crazy,” Engel said.
“The last image I had of Yuval and all of her family, other than her father, was of them on the side of the road surrounded by two armed terrorists as we drove away. I was sure they either had been kidnapped or were murdered that day,” he added.
Engel, Yossi Sharabi and Amit Shani were taken to Gaza by two terrorists, one driving, the other pointing his gun at them. Engel still remembers the sight of dead bodies in the kibbutz and Gazans leaving the scene with bags full of items.
The ride to Gaza took 20 minutes—past the first breached fence of the kibbutz and the second that separated Israel from the Strip—with the car arriving at 1:30 p.m.
The three captives were promptly placed in the house of one of the kidnappers, where they were interrogated for an hour and a half about their age, residence and army service.
“One of the terrorists called his friends and family, even his mother, to come observe us. They looked very happy, laughing and smiling. We felt like animals at a zoo,” he said. “At night, they moved us to another house. There, we slept on a couch with eight armed terrorists who kept yelling at us in Arabic. They seemed like they hated us and were ready to shoot us in the head at any second.”
Engel would spend 26 days in a room in that house with Sharabi and Shani.
“Two terrorists were guarding us and wouldn’t allow us to stand. We needed to ask for permission to go to the bathroom. They wouldn’t say no, but they clearly weren’t happy when we asked. We were told every day how we’d never go home,” Engel said.
“We slept on mattresses on the floor. They gave us two pieces of bread a day, cheese, canned meat and a quarter of a bottle of water,” he recounted. “They also gave us cards and we played from morning to night. Sometimes, we even played with the terrorists. But we never let them win. We didn’t want to make them feel like they were beating us at anything.”
‘We Wrote In Fear’
Following nearly a month in that location, Engel and the other two captives were moved to the house of their captors’ commander.
“He was a very mean man. He didn’t let us speak at all. He locked us inside a room and kept telling us we’d die in Gaza,” Engel said.
After 40 days of captivity, terrorists arrived with a camera to record two videos. In the first, they asked the hostages to state their names, ages and where they were from. They were instructed to say that they were being taken care of and fed, and to ask the Israeli government to bring them home.
In the second, they were told to say that they were sharing three dates and half a glass of water—that they couldn’t survive this way.
“We thought it was a good thing. We believed they would release the clips and our families would know that we were alive,” Engel said. “But they never published them.”
On day 48, terrorists came at night with pens and paper, telling the captives that they were going to die and needed to write goodbye letters.
Psychologically Tortured
“I wrote to Yuval, to my family, to my friends,” Engel said. “I wrote a whole page, maybe even more. It was terrifying because they’d just come and say something like that and you couldn’t know whether it was true. We told ourselves that if they asked us to write the letters, it was probably true. We wrote in fear; went to sleep terrified; and realized the next morning that it wasn’t real—that they’d lied to us again. The fear kept growing and with each passing day, there was less food.”
After 53 days, Engel, Shani and Sharabi were moved again.
“It was nighttime and dark. We couldn’t see much. Suddenly, in the middle of the street, they separated Sharabi from us and took him away. It was the last time I saw him; we didn’t even get to say goodbye,” Engel said. “In captivity, I felt scared constantly, because at any given moment those terrorists who hated me could have killed me. Yossi [Sharabi] was like a father. He always helped and gave us hope. He kept saying we would make it out. I don’t know what I would have done without him.”
Then Engel and Shani were taken to the lobby of an old building, seated on chairs and told they were returning home.
“We obviously thought the terrorists were lying,” he said.
He went on: “They took us from there by car with two women dressed in jalabiyas whom we assumed were Arabs. But suddenly, one of them whispered in Hebrew, ‘Do you speak English?’ I was in shock. I didn’t answer. She asked again and I said, ‘yes.’ She explained they were also captives and that we had to be quiet.”
It turned out that the two women, Moran Stella Yanai and Raya Rotem, were ultimately freed. They all arrived at a location where more Israeli female hostages were waiting, some with a radio. They confirmed to him that a deal for their release was about to be concluded.
“In that house, there were lots of terrorists, but they were much nicer,” Engel said. “They gave us many pitas, drinks and sweets. They wanted us to go back with good feelings and say we were treated well, but we weren’t.”
He continued: “We stayed there until the morning when they moved us to what would be our last location before handing us to the Red Cross. They said the confirmation from Israel would come at 6 p.m. Meanwhile, more hostages arrived, including Itay Regev, Liam Or and Liat Atzili. We welcomed them and gave them food. I knew Liam through Yuval. We looked at each other and asked, ‘What are you doing here?’ The situation was absurd.”
Until the last minute, Hamas terrorists psychologically tortured the captives, telling them Israel did not want them, as they waited for the confirmation, which only came at 9 p.m.
“They put all 11 of us in a big van and drove to meet representatives of the Red Cross. They took us out of the van and delivered us in pairs. There must have been 200 armed, masked terrorists around.
“We were then taken to Gaza’s Rafah crossing with Egypt, where we encountered the first Israelis who weren’t hostages, and we finally knew we’d be OK. They took us to Israel’s Kerem Shalom crossing and then to the IDF Hatzerim base.
“I had no idea what had happened to Yuval and her family. I asked one of the soldiers on the bus from Kerem Shalom to Hatzerim if she knew, and she said that they were alive and well. I started crying like a 3-year-old because I’d been sure they were dead.”
At the Hatzerim base, Engel reunited with his parents. He was then taken to Schneider Children’s Medical Center, where he saw Yuval for the first time since Oct. 7. The video of their reunion went viral.
“Suddenly, I’m coming back. I’m returning home, and I realize she’s alive and I see her. So many life-changing events happened in less than 24 hours. It was crazy,” Engel said.
Hearts And Minds
On day 97, Hamas published a video of Yossi Sharabi’s dead body. Shortly afterwards, IDF soldiers informed the family that he had been killed in Gaza.
“It was very tragic for me because I was with him for two months,” said Engel. “We were held in the same room. I knew he was OK; I knew he was feeling fine. But time there had an impact. As time passes, hostages die and we don’t want them to return in coffins. We want them alive.”
Hamas is still holding 101 hostages. Among those known to be dead is Yossi Sharabi. His brother, Eli—Yuval’s uncle, also in captivity in Gaza—is presumed alive.
Emotional Paralysis
“Physically, I’m OK,” Engel said. “Emotionally, I can’t do anything for myself because the fact that there are still hostages held in Gaza prevents me from starting to recover. If I were still a hostage, I would want everyone who returns to do everything they could to help me. Traditionally, the IDF knocks on a family’s door to announce that a loved one is gone. This is almost the only opportunity Israel ever had to knock on the doors of those people and say that their loved ones have returned.”
On the day he spoke to JNS, Engel was about to depart for Los Angeles to mark the launch of the virtual-reality “Be the Witness” initiative, part of the “Survived to Tell” project. There, he and Nimrod Palmach, CEO of Israel-is, which partners with producer Stephen D. Smith in the initiative, are scheduled to visit college campuses, communities and synagogues, as well as meet with leaders of organizations and social-media influencers.
“We want to touch people’s hearts and minds and share the nature of Israel while exposing them to the atrocities of Oct. 7,” Palmach told JNS. “I think the purity of Ofir as a young kid who was kidnapped and marked his 18th birthday in the darkness of Gaza surrounded by evil is very impactful, especially when combined with the VR experience.”
