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'He asked if I recognized him': Hostage who met Sinwar gives first interview
The three-time cancer survivor, a Kibbutz member for over 49 years, Margalit Mozes decided she would 'show no fear' keeping it through a sleepless 50 days
Returned hostage Margalit Mozes recalled her traumatic yet brave experience in the tunnels of Hamas after being abducted on October 7 from Kibbutz Nir Oz, during a powerful first full-length interview with Israel’s Channel 12.
The 77 year-old three-time cancer survivor was not a pushover at any moment of her kidnapping or captivity in Gaza, deciding from the first fateful moment that she would “sit calmly and show no fear,” eventually being called “Captain Margalit” by her captives.
"I was sitting in the bomb shelter, knitting and I started hearing gunshots," Mozes began. "Around 9:30 I heard the glass shatter and then I realized that they came to me too. I saw a man in civilian clothes with a rifle. I decided that I would be sitting calmly, showing no fear.”
“I know a little Arabic, so I told him he shouldn't shoot,” she recalled the first moments of the kidnapping, during which she requested a moment to change out of her nightgown and take a CPAP respirator with her.
On the way to Gaza, she remembered the road well from 40 years ago when she used to visit the beach at Khan Yunis. Once there, “there were crowds on both sides and applauded” the captured human prize.
From there, she was taken into a tunnel but struggled due to her bad knees, saying someone tried to rush her along and ”got mad at me, took the CPAP respirator off me, grabbed my glasses and disappeared.”
Mozes remembered tunnels as "You walk and walk and the door seems to move away from you every time,” and the entire time they were not allowed to speak loudly.
The hostages were then divided into groups, and she joked that her group of elderly people over the age of 75 was the “doctor-at-standby” group, due to all of them requiring some form of medication or medical assistance, but without her CPAP respirator she could not sleep the entire time.
Nevertheless, she continued in her determination to not show fear and now decided to even build a personal relationship with the terrorist captors, recalling how their first question was “if we were Likud.”
"I told them we were Meretz,” the Kibbutznik for 49 years replied, and when the subject of religion came up, she said “I don’t believe in God, but in people.”
Despite their struggle to pronounce Margalit, she eventually wrote the name down in Arabic and from then on she was called “Captain Margalit.” She even spoke with Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in the tunnel, who asked her if she recognized him.
When a new terrorist captor arrived to watch over the hostages, she even educated him that his disrespectful attempt to shut her up was disrespectful to an elderly woman, going to his superior and asking if he would speak to his mother or grandmother that way.