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Edited by: Fern Sidman

In an emotional and chilling interview aired on Israel’s N12 and covered in detail by VIN News, freed hostage Eliya Cohen has broken his silence for the first time since his release, sharing the full harrowing story of his survival—from the joyful hours before the Hamas attack at the Nova music festival to the unspeakable horrors of 505 days in captivity in Gaza. His story is one of devastation, courage, and extraordinary resilience, offering the world an unfiltered window into the massacre of October 7 and its brutal aftermath.

Speaking with raw emotion, Cohen began by describing the euphoric atmosphere on that fateful morning of Simchat Torah. “We arrived at four in the morning,” he told N12, as reported by VIN News. “The whole area was packed with friends. We were drunk and having the best time of our lives—laughing and hugging everyone.”

But just two hours later, the skies above the Nova festival in southern Israel erupted. “We heard the first interception in the sky,” Cohen said, describing the barrage of rocket fire as a “crazy fireworks show.” The sense of celebration was quickly pierced by dread.

He looked at his girlfriend, Ziv, and voiced a gut instinct to flee. “I don’t want to stay here,” he told her. She didn’t hesitate. “No problem, I’ll get us out of here,” she responded. They were among the first to head toward a shelter, unaware they were entering what would soon become a death trap.

As reported by VIN News, Cohen remembers the moment he first met Alon Ahel in that shelter—one of the many Israeli civilians who would soon be under siege. Ahel is still held hostage by Hamas. As more people crammed into the small space, alerts began buzzing on phones. Reports of terrorist infiltrations filtered in, but many in the shelter still believed that the IDF would arrive soon.

That hope evaporated when a man burst into the shelter, bleeding from a gunshot wound, confirming the worst. “We understood this was much more than just rockets,” Cohen said, “but we had full faith that the army was coming.” Still hearing gunfire but no sign of an Israeli response, Cohen turned to Ziv and said, “They’re going to come here, I’m telling you. Let’s grab our legs and run.” Ziv, terrified, insisted they remain hidden.

Then the sound of Arabic shouting and truck engines filled the air. “They threw the first grenade,” Cohen said. “Someone screamed: ‘Grenade! Grenade!’ I jumped on Ziv, completely covering her, and the first thing that came out of my mouth was: ‘Ziv, I love you,’” Cohen told Israel’s N12. She responded through tears and terror: “‘Eliya, I love you too.’”

As the grenades rained down, one man stood up—Aner Shapira. “Out of nowhere, he said: ‘We can’t let them kill us like this,’” Cohen recounted during the interview with Israel’s N12. “Another grenade was thrown. He grabbed it and threw it back outside. I saw it with my own eyes. Everyone knew exactly what he was doing.” According to VIN News who cited the interview at Israel’s N12, Shapira’s selfless bravery gave the others a glimmer of hope amid carnage.

Ziv remembered the atmosphere inside the shelter. “Everyone was cheering for him—saying how brave he was. I kept thinking to myself: How are they even functioning? I’m about to lose my mind.” Ahel, amid the chaos, even tried calling the police. “He tells the officer: ‘We’re in a shelter. They’re throwing grenades at us. They’re shooting at us.’ The response he got was: ‘Hide, okay? Bye.’”

The heroism was short-lived. “At some point,” Cohen said, “Aner was holding a grenade, and I saw that they had managed to shoot him. He fell to the floor, and the grenade exploded with him. At that moment, I thought: ‘I can’t believe it. The guy who was protecting us is gone.’”

Cohen was then taken into captivity—a nightmare that would stretch across 505 days inside Hamas-controlled tunnels in Gaza. VIN News reported that during his imprisonment, Cohen endured appalling conditions: psychological torment, deprivation, and the constant fear of execution. While his interview with N12 focused primarily on the Nova attack, the mere mention of his captivity and the duration—more than a year and four months—underscored the inhumanity he and other hostages were subjected to.

His release, part of a negotiated hostage exchange, has brought only partial closure. Alon Ahel, who stood beside him in the shelter and placed a desperate call for help, remains in captivity. For Cohen, freedom is shadowed by the memory of those who didn’t make it and the knowledge that others still suffer in the tunnels.

After the death of Aner Shapira—who heroically threw back live grenades before being fatally struck by gunfire—others inside the shelter followed his lead. “I remember a girl who picked up a grenade and threw it outside,” Cohen recalled in the N12 interview, as reported by VIN News. But then came the final grenade—the one that severed Hirsch’s hand. “After that, no one else got up to throw grenades anymore.”

Amid the chaos, love and humanity endured. As grenades fell and bodies collapsed, Cohen and his girlfriend Ziv clung to each other. “I saw a body and just grabbed it to cover myself,” he recounted to Israel’s N12 and reported by VIN News. “I thought, ‘At least if grenades explode, this will protect me and Ziv.’” Through the carnage, Ziv kept reaching out to him. “We held hands, and she kept gently nudging me on the back, saying: ‘Eliya, are you okay? I’m alive.’”

“We were buried under bodies,” Ziv added. “But we were in our own world.” In those moments, she whispered a sentence to him that would become the emotional anchor for the next 505 days of his life:

“At least up there, we’ll be together, and no one will be able to separate us.”

It was a declaration of love and fatalism, a belief that if they were to die, they would die united.

Ziv heard a scream. Eliya had been shot in the leg. He began slipping in and out of consciousness, his mind fragmented by trauma. From that point, he remembers nothing until 11 AM. Of the 27 people who hid in the shelter, The VIN News report confirmed that 16 were murdered, four—including Cohen—were kidnapped, and only seven survived. Two of the captives have since been released; one, Alon Ahel, remains in Hamas captivity.

When Eliya regained consciousness, he recited Shema Yisrael—the traditional Jewish prayer of faith and martyrdom. Then he opened his eyes. What he saw would never leave him.

“Three terrorists stood above us,” Cohen told Israel’s N12, as per the VIN News report. “They had phones and flashlights, filming us. With a crazy smile on their faces. A psychotic smile. I will never forget that smile in my life. I go to sleep with that smile, I live with it. That’s the smile of my kidnapping.”

They took him at gunpoint. “That’s the moment I felt our hands separate,” Ziv later recalled. “I couldn’t understand what was happening.”

Outside the shelter, the world had turned into a battlefield. Eliya saw dozens of terrorists and trucks. “You’re thinking to yourself: What is going on? Am I in Israel? Where am I?”

The trucks were filled with hostages. Cohen understood he was being taken to Gaza. The terrorists, he said, celebrated wildly. “They beat us mercilessly, hit us with rifle butts on the head, stomped on us, and spit on us,” he told Israel’s N12, as was noted in the VIN News report.

One hostage attempted a desperate escape. “He chose to take the situation into his own hands and said: ‘I’m jumping.’ We told him, ‘Don’t do it,’ but he did it anyway while the car was moving.” The terrorists immediately stopped, shot him dead, and continued driving as if nothing had happened.

Upon arrival in Gaza, Cohen was told to shower. “That was the first time I saw myself in the mirror after the attack,” he recounted to Israel’s N12. “I was covered in blood. My entire body and face had burned skin hanging off. I looked at myself and thought: I can’t believe I have pieces of other people’s bodies on me.”

Still, something inside him clicked. “I pulled myself together and told myself: There’s no way I’m not getting out of here. I’ll give them what they want, and I’ll act fine with them.”

What came next was a grotesque parody of medical care. A man who claimed to be a doctor approached him to remove the bullet from his leg—without anesthesia.

“He stuffed a piece of cloth in my mouth and told me: ‘You’re not allowed to scream. If the civilians outside hear you, they’ll come into the house, and I won’t be able to protect you.’”

From the outset of their transfer to underground tunnels, Cohen and other captives were placed in shackles and subjected to extreme deprivation. “We ate a dry pita a day with two spoonfuls of beans or peas,” Cohen told Israel’s N12, as was reported by VIN News. But even this pitiful ration was a weapon. “Sometimes they brought less. Sometimes we had to share.” It was not a system of survival, but of calculated torment.

“They’d make us strip naked to check how skinny we were,” he revealed during the N12 interview, “deciding whether to cut down our food rations based on that. And they did it with a smile.” The captors, Cohen says, were methodical in their cruelty, turning starvation into psychological torture.

“These were not people simply following orders. They were truly evil,” Cohen said plainly. “I hate Holocaust comparisons, but there’s nothing more Nazi than this.”

Amid the physical and mental suffering, one image haunted Cohen more than any other: the thought that Ziv, the woman he loved and tried to shield during the October 7 massacre, had perished. “In my mind, there was no scenario where she survived,” he told Israel’s N12, according to the VIN News report. “At first, that thought was unbearable.”

But while he languished in darkness, Ziv was very much alive—and fighting. She became a prominent voice in the media, pressing the government and the world to bring Eliya and the other hostages home. Alongside her was Eliya’s mother, who fought tirelessly for answers. “I slammed my fist on Netanyahu’s table,” she said, as reported by VIN News. “Enough. Bring our kids home.”

While government officials continue to insist that only military pressure will bring the hostages back, Eliya’s account from inside the tunnels tells a different story.

“Every day they bomb Gaza,” Eliya recounted when speaking with Israel’s N12. “the terrorist comes into the room and tightens our shackles even more.” In their underground prison, the hostages became both victims of Hamas and pawns in a broader political conflict.

According to the VIN News report, the psychological warfare was constant. Hamas captors openly tied the suffering of Israeli hostages to the treatment of Palestinian security prisoners in Israel. “They’d come and say, ‘You are mistreating our prisoners, so I will torture you here.’”

          (To Be Continued Next Week)