Chen Goldstein-Almog, 49, arrives with her parents for an interview at the Dan Panorama Hotel in Tel Aviv. She lives here like so many Israelis who have been unable to return to their villages and towns near the Gaza Strip since October 7. When her parents have left, she plucks a few handkerchiefs from a packet and slips them between her thigh and the chair. She will need them several times during the interview.

She spent 51 days in the hands of the terrorists in Gaza together with her daughter Agam, 17, and her sons Gal, 11, and Tal, nine. On November 26, the family was released as part of a hostage deal. Her husband Nadav, 48, and daughter Yam, 20, were shot dead by the terrorists in their home in the Kfar Aza kibbutz on October 7.

The evening before the interview, Goldstein-Almog spoke in front of thousands of people at a demonstration in Tel Aviv. The rallies take place every Saturday, with participants demanding that the government do everything it can to free the hostages.

DER SPIEGEL: Ms. Goldstein-Almog, you have been free for over eight weeks now – are your thoughts still in Gaza, with the other hostages?

Goldstein-Almog: Yes. I have been counting every day since our return, I think about the other hostages every day. They asked us to fight for them, to go to demonstrations and not to forget them. When you're in Gaza, you don't know what will be done for you. All you know is that the days go by and nothing happens.

DER SPIEGEL: Can you imagine how the women still being held hostage are doing now?

Goldstein-Almog: In the first week, when we were there together, they did everything they could to survive. Really everything. One helping the other with wounds, with bandages. If one broke down, the others tried to be there for her, to raise her spirits. So, now I ask myself whether we are doing everything for them.

DER SPIEGEL: And what is your answer: Is the country doing everything it can?

Goldstein-Almog: I would have expected the liberation of the hostages to be the top priority and for the government to say: "First of all, we have to get them out of there." And not: "First we have to destroy Hamas." The conditions there are really, really tough. We were often hungry, there was hardly any fresh air, there was intense fighting all around us. We were constantly afraid.

DER SPIEGEL: Please tell us how you experienced October 7, the day of the attack by Hamas and other terrorist groups.

Goldstein-Almog: We woke up at around 6:30 in the morning when the alarm sounded and we all immediately ran to the safe room, my eldest daughter Yam's bedroom. My husband Nadav was slower, he had had a serious cycling accident in July. We heard via WhatsApp that terrorists had infiltrated the kibbutz and that we should close the blinds. I remember seeing soldiers in front of our house with green uniforms. We went back into the shelter, closed the door, and I thought: "Wow, the army is already here."

DER SPIEGEL: But it wasn't the army.

Goldstein-Almog: Yes, in retrospect I understood that. At some point, we heard a "boom" in the house, then it was quiet. We carefully opened the door of the safe room and saw that the bathroom was damaged. It's located directly next to the shelter and has a door to the outside. The terrorists must have thrown a grenade and blown the door open. We tried to lock the shelter door handle with the cable from Yam's hair straightener, but it didn't work. Then we turned on the TV and saw the pictures of pick-up trucks with terrorists.

Goldstein-Almog: We leaned the bed against the door of the safe room. Sometimes we heard light gunfire; otherwise it was quiet. And suddenly the terrorists were in the house. They shot at the door, Nadav took a plank from Yam's bed to defend himself. Then they came in, I don't remember hearing shots, but Nadav fell to the floor. I saw two or three bullet holes in his chest. The men stormed into our safe room. They ordered us to get dressed, as we were only wearing pyjamas. Yam couldn't manage to pull up her jeans, she was getting nervous. One of the men found her army uniform in the wardrobe. I remember his eyes, green and big, he was shouting something in Arabic. When we were supposed to go out, Yam fainted. We laid her on the bathroom floor, I wanted to splash water on her face, but the shower was damaged from the explosion. For a moment, I ran outside to check on the boys. When I returned to the bathroom, I saw that they had shot Yam. They had shot her in the face. Every day in Gaza, I forced myself not to forget that image.

DER SPIEGEL: Then you and your three children Agam, Tal and Gal were taken to Gaza?

Goldstein-Almog: They forced us to get into Nadav's car, but it wouldn't start. They then took the keys from my car. I remember telling them the code while I was frozen with fear. The two terrorists were sitting in the front, they were cheerful, filming us in the back seat. I remember the look on my children's faces. They had never looked at me like that before. The terrorists stopped in between and loaded bodies into the trunk. We were in Gaza in seven minutes.

DER SPIEGEL: Did you realize at that point that you were now hostages of Hamas?

Goldstein-Almog: I understood that they were taking us to Gaza. That was a shock. I still thought that we might have missed the army by a few minutes. And somehow I still had a glimmer of hope that maybe Nadav would be saved. That he wasn't dead.

DER SPIEGEL: Where were you taken?

Goldstein-Almog: The area looked deserted and neglected. After a few minutes, the men stopped and loaded us into another car. Shortly afterwards, we drove into the yard of a private house and they closed the gate. There was a house and a tunnel. A black hole in the ground. That was the first time my son Tal cried.

DER SPIEGEL: You had to go down into the tunnel with the children?

Goldstein-Almog: There was a ladder with a few rungs. Once we reached the bottom, we walked for about 10 minutes and came to a room where we met an elderly couple from Kfar Aza There was also a young man, 26 years old.

DER SPIEGEL: Was this place prepared for the hostages?

Goldstein-Almog: I assume so, there were mats on the floor. And lots of sand. Every time someone went to the toilet, sand came in, there was sand everywhere. I remember the sand in my mouth.

DER SPIEGEL: There was also a toilet in the tunnel?

Goldstein-Almog: Yes. But without a flush, the smell was pungent. If someone wanted to go to the toilet, I went with them, just to move around a bit, because the room was really small.

DER SPIEGEL: How long were you in the tunnel?

Goldstein-Almog: Two days and two nights. On the second night, they told us that they would take us to a more comfortable place. And indeed, they took us away in the middle of the night. But they seemed to be waiting for something, we had to sleep in the tunnel, seven people, with three guards. My daughter Agam had breathing problems and a panic attack. To calm her down, one of the guards said: "Tuesday, you're in Israel."

DER SPIEGEL: That would have been the next day.

Goldstein-Almog: I thought that there had never been a situation like this before, with children, civilians and women being held captive in the tunnels of Gaza. I said to myself: Israel will not start fighting. But at the same time, I understood that our release would not be so quick. If the terrorists kidnapped us and immediately got everything they wanted, they would do it again and again. So, I understood that we would have to pay a certain price. But the more days passed, I realized that it had gotten complicated.

DER SPIEGEL: What was the "more comfortable" place you were then taken to?

Goldstein-Almog: It was an apartment where we stayed for another two days. First, they picked up the 26-year-old, then they put me, my children and the elderly couple in a car. Before that, Agam and I had to put on a jalabiya and a hijab. It was terrible, we felt as if they were taking away our identity. We looked at each other and cried. The journey through Gaza was long and hard. Once they stopped for a long time in front of a hospital. After driving around for a while, we reached another apartment. Early in the morning of the second day, two girls were brought to us, both were soldiers, 18 and 19 years old, who had been drafted in July and were completing their basic training. They had arrived at the base in Nahal Oz on Thursday – and on Saturday, they were abducted to Gaza. Two other female soldiers arrived later. We only spent a few hours with them, because that afternoon, I was taken with the children to the apartment, where we would spend the next five weeks.

DER SPIEGEL: Were the same guards there with you the whole time – and were you able to establish a connection with them?

Goldstein-Almog: We were guarded by six men who took turns. I just remembered that I forgot to tell you that in the apartment before that, one of the commanders wanted to handcuff me because he didn't like the way I was walking around. But I told him: "I'm a mother with children, I need to be able to look after them." He backed down.

DER SPIEGEL: How did you communicate with your guards?

Goldstein-Almog: There was one who spoke some Hebrew, another spoke English. He sometimes asked Agam to teach him Hebrew.

DER SPIEGEL: Did your daughter do that?

Goldstein-Almog: Yes, when she was in the mood for it. And one of the men wrote down 250 words in Arabic, which my son Gal wrote next to them in Hebrew.

DER SPIEGEL: You probably tried to keep the terrorists in a good mood?

Goldstein-Almog: Yes. We tried to talk to them. Those were difficult conversations. Sometimes, it was about the roots of the conflict. They said that we had started in 1948, that we had killed their grandparents, we expelled them. Agam and I usually stopped the discussion at this point because we didn't want to get to bad places with them. It always created a tense atmosphere.

DER SPIEGEL: You’re a social worker, so you know how to talk to people. Did you try with other topics?

Goldstein-Almog: There were many conversations, but there was also a lot of silence. They often just stared at us, which was very uncomfortable. There was this one young guy who just sat there and stared at us. There was no privacy. Crying was forbidden. They wanted us to be happy. But every day, there was a moment when one of us cried.

DER SPIEGEL: As a mother, you want to protect your children at all costs, to give them a sense of security. How did you manage that in this situation?

Goldstein-Almog: We made up games. The boys built a tower out of pillows and you had to remove a pillow without the tower collapsing. There were also notebooks in the apartment, so they wrote and drew a lot. Later, they were no longer allowed to write in Hebrew. One of our guards even threatened to set fire to their pictures with a lighter. At some point, there were no pens and paper. They kept themselves busy for the most part, in an amazing way. They had to be quiet a lot. Be quiet, that's what our guards constantly ordered them to do.

DER SPIEGEL: Did you know at the time what had happened in Israel on October 7 and afterward?

Goldstein-Almog: There was a radio that we were allowed to use, but for a maximum of 10 minutes at a time – they made sure it wasn't longer. We switched between the Israeli stations Galatz, Galei Zahal, Kan 11, Bet, whatever we could receive. That was our connection to reality. There were many things that our guards told us that later turned out not to be true.

DER SPIEGEL: Some hostages were told things like: "Israel is destroyed, there is no more Israel." Did the terrorists tell you the same thing?

Goldstein-Almog: No, they told us partial information, and we tried to puzzle it together. With the radio news, we understood the extent of the attack, that people couldn't return home. We also heard that Kfar Aza was a closed military zone. We were shocked when we understood that we couldn't return there.

DER SPIEGEL: Can you describe your life in this apartment where you were held captive?

Goldstein-Almog: The windows were closed, with heavy curtains in front of them, so that hardly any air or daylight came in. We weren't allowed to open them because the neighbors would have been able to hear us. There was a door to a balcony, and sometimes I put my head on the floor in the morning to get some fresh air. Most of the day we were in one room, and if we asked to be allowed to walk back and forth a bit, one of the guards would go ahead of us.

DER SPIEGEL: Did you get enough to eat and drink?

Goldstein-Almog: We were given tea in the morning and something to eat twice a day. Pita with olive oil or a piece of cheese. But over time that became less and less. Later, there were no more pitas at all. Sometimes, we cooked with our guards, rice and noodles. They also brought us water, but there were days when we only got a small bottle.

DER SPIEGEL: And at the same time, the war was raging around you. Were you afraid that a bomb might fall on the house?

Goldstein-Almog: Yes, it was very frightening. During the day, it was relatively quiet, but at night there was a lot of shelling from fighter jets and artillery. We heard other apartments around us being hit. And we were also afraid all the time that our guards would turn against us. We understood that they were just cogs in the system and that they would kill us if they were ordered to do so. We sometimes asked them about it. But they replied: "No, we’re looking after you. We will die, you will not die." At one point they said: "We're going to die together."

DER SPIEGEL: Were your guards also the ones who had kidnapped you?

Goldstein-Almog: We talked to them about what happened in our house that Saturday, and it seemed to us that it wasn't the same group. The ones who took care of us seemed more human. One of them said he had been in the city of Sderot on Saturday and had kidnapped a family there. But no family was kidnapped from Sderot, so he must have been lying. After we were freed, we learned from the Shabak (Eds: the domestic intelligence service Shin Bet) that more than one of the group was involved in the attack.

DER SPIEGEL: Some of the hostages were filmed by the terrorists. Was that also the case with you, and how did that happen?

Goldstein-Almog: They filmed us three or four times. It was staged, they told us exactly what to say. The first time, on the very second day in the tunnel, we were only supposed to say our names and ages. When we were in the apartment, I was supposed to talk about the attacks by Israeli fighter jets and ask for the bombing to stop. I cried a bit in the end, so we had to repeat the recording. I hoped that maybe someone in Israel would see it. As a kind of sign of life.

DER SPIEGEL: Your daughter Agam wrote in an article that she was afraid of being raped. How did you try to protect her?

Goldstein-Almog: Our guards were relatively respectful towards us, but I remember that once one of the men asked Agam to cook with him. I kept going into the kitchen to check on her to make sure nothing was happening.

DER SPIEGEL: You met several young women at the beginning and end of your captivity. Did they tell you about sexual abuse?

Goldstein-Almog: I know that these girls experienced very serious sexual assaults. There was a young woman who was crying and one of the men took advantage of her weakness, he stroked her, touched her upper body. That is despicable and disgusting. Another guard held a gun to a woman's temple, kissed her and touched her all over her body. There are also other experiences that I can't recount because the women want to tell their families first.

DER SPIEGEL: Did you see that yourself, or did the women tell you?

Goldstein-Almog: These are things that the women told me when we met them shortly before our release. Some of them are still hostages.

DER SPIEGEL: Some believe that they won't be released because they may have been raped and Hamas doesn't want that to be known. Do you believe that too?

Goldstein-Almog: I don't know. But I wonder whether the fact that we are talking about it now isn’t being used against them there.

DER SPIEGEL: You spent the last week of your captivity in a tunnel again. Can you describe your time there?

Goldstein-Almog: The conditions there were very difficult. The room in the tunnel was tiled, there were mattresses on the floor that stank of mold. There was sand everywhere and hardly any fresh air. There was a fan and a neon light on the ceiling that was always on. In the end, there were eleven of us there. Several of us slept on the mattresses, it was very cramped. We were hungry, sometimes we didn't get anything to eat until the afternoon.

DER SPIEGEL: How did you learn about your release?

Goldstein-Almog: From Thursday, we were told that there would be a cease-fire. But there was a lot of back and forth, they told us that Israel was not fulfilling its obligations, that the agreement would fail. Then there was the cease-fire, and they told us every day that we were on the list and would be released, but it was only on Sunday that we were released. It crushes you. You’re already trying not to get your hopes up, so as not to be badly disappointed.

DER SPIEGEL: On Sunday, November 26, you and your children were finally released. Some hostages described how they were attacked by a crowd. How did your release go?

Goldstein-Almog: We were taken to a square where a crowd was waiting. It was humiliating. We had to walk a short distance to the Red Cross jeeps and we were filmed. Later, when we were sitting in the Red Cross car, a guy jumped on the car with a stick. The whole day was scary, right up to the last moment.

DER SPIEGEL: What did you feel when you realized that the other women weren't being released with you?

Goldstein-Almog: There was great joy at our release, but also a lot of sadness. We felt the pain of the girls who were left behind. We promised them that we would do everything we could to make their voices heard.

DER SPIEGEL: Since then, you have spoken at demonstrations on behalf of the hostages and given interviews. Because you made this promise to the women?

Goldstein-Almog: Yes, and I constantly ask myself whether I am doing enough. These public appearances and interviews are difficult for me. They do help me to organize and process what we've been through. But they cost me a lot of energy. We are trying to organize our new life without Nadav and without Yam. And at the same time, I can hear the voices of the women saying: "Don't forget us."

DER SPIEGEL: Since then, you have spoken at demonstrations on behalf of the hostages and given interviews. Because you made this promise to the women?

Goldstein-Almog: Yes, and I constantly ask myself whether I am doing enough. These public appearances and interviews are difficult for me. They do help me to organize and process what we've been through. But they cost me a lot of energy. We are trying to organize our new life without Nadav and without Yam. And at the same time, I can hear the voices of the women saying: "Don't forget us."

DER SPIEGEL: The people at the demonstrations are demanding a deal with Hamas and a cease-fire so that the hostages can be released. Is that also your demand?

Goldstein-Almog: We must free them at all costs. It is our moral obligation as a country towards the hostages, they are women, children, elderly people, soldiers. Yes, children! We have no right to exist as a country if we don't free them. The women there are doing everything they can to survive, to function, with their wounds and with their disabilities, even though one of the women has lost her fingers. So, are we doing everything for them too? That’s what I’m asking.

DER SPIEGEL: Many of the survivors of the October 7 attack have lost their trust in the government. Have you too?

Goldstein-Almog: I feel anger that we were abandoned on October 7 and that seven weeks had to pass before we were released. How could our political leadership abandon us like that, why are they still abandoning the hostages who have already been in captivity for a quarter of a year?