|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
One of the women released from Hamas captivity in the November hostage deal revealed for the first time on Army Radio Thursday that she had met Yarden Bibas and Ofer Kalderon from her kibbutz while down in the tunnels where they were all being held.
told interviewer Ilana Dayan that she had walked to an area that was completely dark and found the two Nir Oz residents caged in pens, like animals.
“I asked, ‘Why are you in a pen?’” she recounted. “They said they didn’t know. When I asked if they had confronted Hamas – it turned out that they had.”
Moshe said she had cultivated a friendly relationship with her captors, knowing that it could help her group, and after waiting two days she approached her guards’ commander.
Bibas told her that he hoped his wife and two young boys had not been kidnapped as well, she said, since he had left them in the safe room to confront the terrorists who had broken into their home. “All the terrorists” in his home had taken him away, first to a gathering point in the kibbutz and then to Khan Younis, she said he told her.
The video of Hamas terrorists abducting his wife Shiri, nine-month-old Kfir and four-year-old Ariel, who are being held close by their obviously terrified mother, is one of the most infamous of all the footage of hostages brutally being taken by the terrorists to the Gaza Strip.
Moshe added that she had tried to find out if the three were being held by Hamas or other terrorists, and all she was told by the guards was that they would try and find out.
In late November, Hamas claimed that Shiri, Ariel and Kfir had been killed in an Israeli air strike, but has never provided proof. The family remains committed to the belief that the whole family is still alive in captivity.
Moshe is a strident advocate for Israel agreeing to any price for a hostage deal and speaks at many rallies calling on the government to seal an agreement with Hamas.
When she spoke at a Kiryat Gat rally Saturday, she referred to the six hostages recently shot and killed by their Hamas guards in a tunnel in Rafah when they saw IDF forces approaching.
She told the crowd that after she was released, she was questioned by the Shabak in order to gain as much knowledge as possible about the terrorists and their tunnels.
She said that she told her questioner that “The moment the IDF enters these tunnels, it will be impossible to save the hostages because Hamas will murder them immediately, in accordance with its faith and ways.”
The terrorists have nothing to lose when they see the Israelis approaching, she explained. “They will murder the hostages because by doing so they’re sure that they are [at least] doing something” before they die.
As for the tunnels, “I told the investigator that it was one huge maze found under the entire Strip… not a tunnel but endless channels.”
