Encouraging elderly hostages to keep fit in Gaza tunnels helped save my life
With a dozen filthy mattresses crammed into the tiny room, there was barely enough space to walk to the lavatory.
A dark and narrow passageway – 72 steps from end to end – sat behind the only door that separated the hostages from the rest of the sprawling, subterranean network of tunnels where they were being held underneath Gaza.
As a nurse, Nili Margalit knew the elderly Israelis and Thai workers she was imprisoned with would have to exercise if their bodies were to survive captivity. So she got everyone on a daily exercise routine.
“I insisted that each one of us will have a few moments every day to get up and to walk. Because it’s very important to maintain movement... the density of the bones,” she told the Telegraph.
Ms Margalit had quickly assumed a senior role among the prisoners.
When they were thrown into the improvised, underground cell, a Hamas member insisted that they produce a list of medicines needed by the hostages to treat any chronic conditions.
Given the scarcity of medicines supplied to her, Ms Margalit was often forced to create cocktails of drugs to keep her new patients’ blood pressures under control.
Able to speak a little Arabic, the 41-year-old helped compile the list of drugs, as well as other supplies she needed to treat the various wounds people had suffered when they were snatched from southern Israel during the Oct 7 terror attack.
On the morning of Oct 7, as news of Hamas’ raid broke, Ms Margalit told her friends she was sheltering in the safe room of her home in the Kibbutz Nir Oz, less than a mile from the Gazan border fence.
By 9.12am her friends had lost communication with her.
Teenage terrorists had arrived at her home and started looting when they discovered she was hiding inside.
They smashed through the door, dragging Ms Margalit, who was barefoot and only wearing pyjamas, onto the street.
The nurse was convinced she was about to be executed in cold blood.
However, she was loaded onto a golf cart and driven towards Gaza in a crowd of hundreds fleeing back across the fenced frontier.
She was taken by her kidnappers, who she now believes were opportunist civilians, to Khan Younis, the enclave’s largest city.
There she was bundled into a warehouse that had access to Hamas’ tunnel network and sold into captivity.
Before she was taken underground, one memory sticks out.
“I immediately recognised my father’s red truck, he had a red four-wheeler,” Ms Margalit said, describing how she had not yet come to terms with the reality of the attack, which saw more than 1,000 Israelis killed and hundreds more kidnapped.
“And even then, I didn’t understand what my father’s red truck was doing there.”
From there, she was taken into the tunnels. The holding cell was dark, humid and barely had enough oxygen to breathe.
The men arrived with blackened and bruised eyes after they were beaten into submission during the kidnappings.
Elderly hostages had their glasses and hearing aids removed.
There was no radio or television to learn of what atrocities had unfurled in the hours after those inside were seized.
A bucket was placed in one corner for the men and women to go to the toilet.
In another corner was an open barrel to clean themselves and their clothes – the same they were wearing when they were kidnapped – and one spare T-shirt.
Not going to feed them again
“But there was nothing to wash with... no soaps,” Ms Margalit said.
A small portion of rice in the morning and half a pita bread was the only rations afforded to the hostages while they were underground.
However, after significant strikes inside Gaza by Israel’s military, the group would be told by a Hamas foot soldier that the terrorist group was angry and not going to feed them again.
The 41-year-old believes her assumed role as the prison cell’s nurse helped keep her safe from the threats of violence by the four Hamas terrorists charged with guarding the captives.
As a nurse I treated them
She said: “As a nurse, the fact I treated them, they never once saw a doctor, so relied on me to take care of them. That was my job.
“So in some way, they tried to keep me safe and sound, so I didn’t suffer from any kind of physical violence.”
But this didn’t stop the psychological abuse.
“There was a lot of mental and emotional abuse,” she continued.
“I always told them ‘my father is dead, my father is dead’, and one time this broke me – it was really hard for me.
“So what they did was whisper around and then told me, ‘Oh no, he’s not dead, see he’s on the list. Don’t be worried, we need you, trust in us, your father is alive, we will take care of him’.”
Israel confirmed death of father
Ms Margalit was left contemplating her father’s fate for 54 days, until she was eventually released on Nov 30.
She was the last of the women to be plucked from the holding cell, taken to a car on the surface, her first glimpse of sunlight in more than a month.
But still then the 41-year-old wasn’t convinced that freedom awaited.
“It was waiting, waiting and waiting, you only had the hope it was happening, but until we saw the Israeli side of the border, we didn’t feel safe,” she concluded.
The day after her release, Israel confirmed the death of her father Eliyahu Margalit, whose body remains in Gaza.
Remaining 134 hostages
Ms Margalit is now travelling through Europe to raise awareness for the remaining 134 hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, as ceasefire talks stumble over their futures.
Arriving in Brussels, she was scared that the Belgian capital, which has a large Muslim population, has become a hotbed of anti-Semitism.
The 41-year-old declined a photograph over fears for her safety.
She was accompanied to Belgium by a shipping container transformed into a lifelike replica of her underground holding cell.
Visitors walked through the pitch black of the exhibition as audio recordings of real-life screams and gunshots from Oct 7 rang out.
But like Ms Margalit, organisers were also concerned for the containers’ safety.
An Israeli diplomatic source said, unlike Geneva where it had stayed for two weeks, it could only stay open in Brussels for four hours.
