Keith and Aviva Siegel: From captivity to freedom, gratitude and a long road to healing

After being kidnapped from Kibbutz Kfar Aza on October 7, Keith and Aviva Siegel endured captivity together before being separated for more than a year. Now reunited, they are sharing their story — and learning how to live again.

For Keith and Aviva Siegel, something as ordinary as stepping outside, breathing fresh air and taking a morning walk has taken on an entirely new meaning.

“To be able to open the door, go outside… to see natural sunlight, to see the sky, to hear birds,” Keith said, reflecting on freedoms that disappeared during his captivity in Gaza.

For Aviva, “I say to myself, I’ve got air, I can breathe, I can drink water whenever I like.”

This year’s Jewish High Holidays carried particular significance for the couple. It was their first holiday season together with no Israeli hostages remaining in Gaza — a milestone coming three years after the October 7, 2023 attack.

“Two years ago, Keith wasn’t here,” Aviva said. “It was a very, very difficult holiday for me. I didn’t want to do anything, and I didn’t want to even feel that there’s a holiday.”

Now, she says, everything feels different.

“For Keith, 100%, we’re very, very lucky to have him with us alive. I think this year, having all the hostages home and having Keith home, it was the first holiday that I could feel that I was happy.”

While in captivity, Keith tried desperately to keep track of time.

“It was very important for me to keep track of the day of the week and the date,” he said. But Jewish holidays were harder to follow. During Passover, he said Hamas captors told him what holiday it was while forcing him to participate in a propaganda video.

“They told us that it’s now Passover and that we should talk in the video about our memories of time with the family during the holiday,” Keith recalled. “That’s when I started to cry.”

The Siegels’ story began nearly half a century earlier.

Keith grew up in North Carolina and moved to Israel at 21. Aviva was born in South Africa and grew up in Israel. The two met when Aviva was just 18 at Kibbutz Gezer.

“The minute that I saw Keith and he opened his mouth and he was like, you know, so calm — everything about him was beautiful,” Aviva remembered. “I fell in love with him.”

They married and eventually raised four children at Kibbutz Kfar Aza, close to the Gaza border.

“Kfar Aza is a beautiful community, really, with lovely, lovely people,” Aviva said. “I was a teacher for little ones, and I loved my job. I used to walk to work barefoot. I just loved it so much. I loved the kids and everything about it.”

Life along the border, however, had long carried danger. Aviva remembers years of rocket fire, including a period before today’s warning and protection systems were in place.

“There were rockets on Kfar Aza for many, many, many years,” she said. “Every time, my body would shake for 24 hours a day. I was so scared that it’s just going to happen and somebody would be killed.”

Nothing prepared them for October 7.

Keith remembers realizing almost immediately that the attack unfolding around them was fundamentally different from the rocket attacks they had experienced before.

“The point in time where I realized this was totally different was when we were getting text messages from all sorts of people that would never text us when it was only just rocket attacks,” he said.

Then came a message on the kibbutz WhatsApp group: “There are terrorists in the kibbutz. Lock the doors and windows. And stay in your safe room.”

Keith initially believed only a small number of attackers had breached the border.

“And then at around 10:30 in the morning, they broke into our house, into our safe room.”

Aviva remembers standing up and screaming.

“We didn’t try to do anything or hit them or shoot them or anything. We just surrendered,” she said. “We didn’t present a threat to them. We didn’t try to resist in any way.”

Keith and Aviva were taken into Gaza and spent the first 50 days of captivity together.

Keith described violence, threats and abuse during his captivity.

“I was incredibly grateful when a day passed when I wasn’t kicked, spat on, or threatened to be killed,” he said. “Because those were things that happened to me. And I also witnessed other hostages — a woman being beaten and literally tortured.”

Both describe moments underground when they “Touched Death” by suffocating..

“All you feel is that maybe one explosion will fall on the entrance of the hole going down underneath the ground,” Aviva said. “And then you suffocate. You haven’t got any air to breathe… We were literally barely gasping for our breath,” Aviva says.

Keith described one of those moments as an encounter with the possibility of death.

“In that tunnel, I experienced one of the few extreme feelings of “death might be imminent — like it’s close.”

Aviva says, “we were threatened all the time. We could have been killed so many times. I was just trying to keep myself alive and trying to figure out, ‘What is it going to be like to feel dead? And what is it going to be like seeing Keith dead?’ And I just prayed all the time, ‘Just let me go first. Please. I don’t want to see Keith dead.’”

Aviva was released after 51 days. Keith remained in captivity a total of 484 days, until February 1, 2025, when he was released as part of a hostage-prisoner exchange.

During his long captivity, Keith says mindfulness, gratitude and a growing connection to Judaism and spirituality helped sustain him.

One of his greatest sources of pain was imagining what his family was going through without knowing whether he was alive.

“The thought of my family not knowing if I’m alive — and if I am alive, how I’m doing — it was very, very…” Keith recalled.

Asked whether that uncertainty could sometimes feel worse than facing death himself, Keith answered simply: “Yes."

He began trying to communicate with his family in his mind.

“I thought that maybe it’s possible that I can convey to my family, mentally, that I’m alive and that I’m okay.”

He would also speak to his mother in his imagination, unaware that she had died two months before his release.

“My mom passed away two months before I was released,” he said.

Even though everyone in Israel knew, Keith did not learn of her death until he returned home.

Since their reunion, Keith and Aviva have taken their story around the world, determined to preserve the memory of October 7 and what they say they experienced in captivity.

Aviva has also written about her ordeal in her memoir, Survived to Tell, describing the process of putting the experience on paper as part of her effort to confront what happened.

Yet coming home has not meant leaving the trauma behind.

“Both of us, we’ve still got a lot to do before we feel like we came back,” Aviva said. “Because, you know, the trauma — you have to deal with that. It’s sitting on us. It’s there, and it’s not that I can take it out of what happened and say, okay, I’m like everybody else. It’s there, and I feel it all the time, and it’s with me all the time.”

As they continue to rebuild their lives, both Keith and Aviva say they carry a profound sense of gratitude toward those who fought to find them and bring them home.

“I don’t know how to even find the words to say thank you to all the IDF soldiers who looked for us and looked for Keith while he was there,” Aviva said.

Keith echoed her gratitude.

“I want to join Aviva in thanking the IDF, the soldiers and all of the security people.“ They’re the reason that we are here and alive and able to sit here and talk to you.”

For Keith, that gratitude extends far beyond those directly involved in the rescue efforts.

“To all the Jews in Israel and all over the world, I just want to say thank you very, very much,” he said. “Your support and your engagement and commitment to me and to my family and to the State of Israel is incredible.”

And after everything he and Aviva endured, Keith ended with a hope that extends beyond his own family.

Aviva has hope for humanity and knows there is a reason she witnessed and survived this dark moment in history. She hopes Survived to Tell, which is available on Amazon, will be a time capsule for future generations.

“Let’s hope and wish that the world will be a better world for everybody — for the Jews and for everybody that lives in this world. Forever. Amen.”