Israeli freed by IDF describes time in Hamas captivity
Qaid Farhan Alkadi, 52, a Bedouin Israeli and father of 11, who worked as a security guard near Kibbutz Magen, eight miles from the Gaza Strip, was seized by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023. He was held for 326 days, until his rescue by Israeli forces on Aug. 27.
On Sept. 4, a week after regaining his freedom, Alkadi recalled his experiences to Channel 12.
He started from the moment he was captured. As with many others, when he first heard the sirens, he assumed it was an aerial attack and entered a safe room. “I thought it was missiles again,” he said
Then he received a call from his brother, who warned him of a terrorist infiltration. “I went outside and I see 100 meters from me three Hamas terrorists shooting in my direction and running towards me. I threw down the phone and raised my hands,” Alkadi said.
“One of them hit me with his weapon. The other kicked me with his foot. They knocked me to the floor and tied my hands. A foreign worker passed by and they shot him right next to me.”
The terrorists tested Alkadi to make sure he was Muslim, asking him about chapters in the Koran and the number of prayers per day. “I spoke to them in Arabic. I told them I was a Muslim,” he said. “They saw that it was okay, and then they told me, ‘Take us in your car to where there are Jews.’”
Asked by the interviewer what he thought at that moment, Alkadi said, “I was ready to die. I wouldn’t point out a Jew, not even a cat. The whole community there are good friends of mine.”
The terrorists put him in a car and took him through the border fence, through an opening. He understood he was being kidnapped. He saw foreign workers, who also had been taken hostage. They were forced into a tunnel opening.
“You see them suddenly disappear,” he said. “I had pain in my leg. I fell on the way several times. There was a guy who decided to take me to Nasar Hospital in Khan Yunis.”
In the hospital, Alkadi was in such pain that he had to walk up the stairs on all fours. The Gazans didn’t help. “They said, ‘Look, here goes our dog.’ There were a lot of people there and you could see their joy. They felt they had won.”
After his leg was operated on without anesthetic, he was put in a room with Aryeh Zalmanovich, 86, a hostage taken from Kibbutz Nir Oz, located about 10 minutes west of Magen.
“He was wounded in the head and hand,” Alkadi said. “Eighty-five years old, with diabetes, just wiped out. He said to me, ‘I’m telling you, it’s not worthwhile being old.’”
Alkadi and Zalmanovich became partners in captivity. For a month and a half, they were kept in one room in the hospital.
“He was lying in bed and I was next to him on a chair and he would tell me stories,” Alkadi told Channel 12. “He had a granddaughter that he loved very much and two sons who live in the north. At every opportunity, he would talk about them.”
Some mornings, Zalmanovich would wake up and tell Alkadi about his dreams of their being released together.
Then, Alkadi was transferred to another room where seven Thai hostages were held, foreign workers who had been taken captive.
After a week, the door opened and a mattress was thrown in. Zalmonovich is thrown onto the mattress. Zalmanovich asks after Alkadi’s leg. “I told him ‘Forget the leg, what about you?’”
Zalmanovich said he had been moved to a room with a Jewish family, who were his neighbors, the parents and two daughters, ages 3 and 5.
As the days passed, Zalmanovich’s health deteriorated. He stopped eating and they connected him to an infusion. For a week and a half, Zalmanovich didn’t speak.
On the day he died, he started talking, Alkadi said. “I got up and came near. He said, ‘Goodbye to the kibbutz. Goodbye to my friends. Goodbye to my granddaughter.’ It tore me apart. I tried to talk to him, call him, ‘Aryeh, Aryeh…’ Nothing, he doesn’t hear. And then it’s all over.
“It was a very difficult parting. Suddenly you have an Israeli with whom you talk and spend time in captivity. You feel that he is a brother, a family, father, everything,” Alkadi said.
Two hours after removing Zalmanovich’s body from the room, they took Alkadi to the corpse, where three Hamas terrorists waited, one a photographer. They told him to sit next to the body and tell them what happened from the moment the two men first met. “Say that Zalmanovich was sick and we tried to help him as much as possible,” the terrorists ordered.
Alkadi was transferred from place to place, first a building in Khan Yunis, which was partially destroyed by an airstrike, and then a tent in an encampment and then to a house, which had an opening to a tunnel into which he was sent.
Asked how he occupied himself, he said, “Sleep, wake and talk to God. I believe. I found a Koran there and 12 to 14 hours a day I read the Koran. I said to myself that if as a Muslim I receive such treatment, what about the Jews? What kind of treatment do they receive?”
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