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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.’”

The impact was immediate. “They tightened our chains, reduced our food, and increased the harassment,” Eliya told Israel’s N12. He described forced undressing, constant manipulation of schedules, and devious tactics to destroy morale.

At one point, he heard an explosion shake the tunnel. It came from a nearby mosque, and the entire structure trembled. “I understood the danger,” he told N12, as was noted in the VIN News report. And from the beginning, their captors made it terrifyingly clear: “If the army tries to rescue you, the first thing we’ll do is kill you.”

The hostages were told time and again: “The IDF will not come out as heroes.”

As the war escalated and IDF forces advanced deeper into Gaza, the captives sensed the end was near—not freedom, but death. “We looked at each other and said, ‘Okay, this is the end,’” Eliya told N12. “I hugged Alon (Ahel, who is still held captive by Hamas] and told him, ‘Close your eyes. In two minutes it will be over. It won’t hurt.’”

They braced for execution. And then, something unimaginable happened.

A Hamas officer entered the room and gave a shocking order: “We are not killing them. Remove their chains. We are getting out of here.”

The hostages, still dazed and injured, were led out of the tunnels and emerged not through a secret border, but from an electrical closet inside a school’s staff room.

What awaited them outside was not freedom’s embrace, but a haunting tableau of annihilation. “The first thing we saw was total apocalypse,” Cohen told N12, as was reported by VIN News. “Not a single building was left standing in Gaza. There was an eerie silence.”

Scattered across the ruins were IDF evacuation leaflets, signs of a battlefield vacated in haste. “There were bodies on every corner. The stench of death was overwhelming,” he said.

And yet, it was over. After 505 days of being shackled, starved, humiliated, and emotionally dismantled, Eliya Cohen had made it out alive.

After months in one of Hamas’s underground hideouts, Eliya and other captives were transferred to a new tunnel, one that made their previous location feel almost humane by comparison. “There was no life there,” Eliya told N12. “No electricity, no water, no food. The only food we had was what we had managed to bring from the previous tunnel. We sat in a room lit only by a flashlight.”

Basic hygiene, already nonexistent, became an afterthought. “There were no beds, so we slept on the floor.” They were completely cut off from the outside world—no light, no air, no noise but the whispers of fear and pain. It was then, Cohen said, that they realized how “privileged” they had been in their previous place of captivity.

But then, something shifted.

According to the testimony Cohen gave to Israel’s N12 and reported by VIN News, the hostages began to notice subtle, then dramatic, changes in their treatment. “At some point, we understood there was some kind of deal happening because the terrorists suddenly became very happy,” Cohen recalled. “More food started coming in.”

Roughly a month before his release, a Hamas commander—referred to by guards as a “big commander”—visited the hostages. Shocked by their deteriorated physical condition, he gave a simple order: “Remove their shackles. The fighting is over.” It was the first human gesture Eliya had witnessed in over a year.

The shift in behavior became even more pronounced after the release of two fellow hostages, Eli and Or, whose frail appearances shocked not only the Israeli public but the terrorists themselves. “Suddenly, they started stuffing us with food,” Eliya said. “It made a lot of noise.”

Could they even eat at that stage? “You become so insecure about food and nutrition that you just want to eat anything you can,” Cohen explained to Israel’s N12, according to the VIN News report. Even indulgence became a survival response—ingrained trauma disguised as appetite.

Then came the cruelest blow.

“They told me: ‘You’re being released, but he’s staying.’” Eliya was stunned. Alon Ahel, his cellmate, comrade, and friend—would not be coming with him.

“Alon panicked. He was terrified and started crying. I looked at him and said, ‘Brother, I’m getting out on 1.3, and you’ll be out on 8.3. It’s all good.’” Eliya says he truly believed a second phase of hostage releases would follow quickly. He didn’t want to leave his friend without hope.

He shared with Israel’s N12 the depth of the bond they formed in the darkness. “He can’t see out of one eye, and his condition is probably not good. We had deep conversations. I told him, ‘Alon, build yourself a routine. Pick up bottles, do some exercise. Spend an hour or two each day on personal development. Don’t forget where you come from and your family.’”

Before leaving, the two embraced. “We hugged and cried. I told him to stay strong. I promised him that just because I was getting out didn’t mean I would forget about him.”

Eliya described Alon as having “pure innocence and a charming soul.” He shared a memory from just a week before his own release: “It was a Monday, and Alon’s birthday was coming up. He started crying and said to them, ‘My birthday is next week, let me go home.’ That’s how innocent he is—he’s special. And the terrorist just looked at him, not knowing how to respond.”

But for Eliya, the most powerful moment came when he knew, beyond all doubt, that he was finally free. As reported by VIN News, it happened as he stepped out of the vehicle.

“That was the happiest moment of my life,” he told N12. “I looked everyone in the eye and gave them a victory sign.” But even then, the cruelty didn’t stop. “The terrorists spit at us and threw bottles. And if you look closely, when I was on the stage, everyone else was standing freely—but they held onto my hands. I tried to raise my hand in triumph, and they wouldn’t let me.”

As the vehicle drove away from Gaza, Eliya realized a bitter truth: many of his friends—people he’d assumed were also being held—hadn’t made it home. “It was a shock,” he recalled. “Everything I had built up in my head—suddenly, I realized it might not be true.”

VIN News confirmed that Eliya was unaware of the extent of the October 7 massacre. As he returned to Israel, the names of the murdered slowly replaced the hope he had carried in captivity.

“I didn’t know them,” Eliya recalled, describing his final hours as a hostage, surrounded by other prisoners who, like him, bore the unmistakable marks of prolonged torment. “I didn’t know most of the hostages—but I could tell they were captives. They were bald, thin, and didn’t look well. I could see they were under extreme stress.”

These deeply human observations, first shared in an emotional interview aired by Israel’s N12 and reported in detail by VIN News, set the stage for what would become one of the most powerful moments of Eliya’s journey: learning that Ziv, his girlfriend—the woman he had shielded with his own body under a hail of grenades—had survived.

After being transferred into Israeli hands, Eliya was placed into an ambulance and driven to safety. It was only once the door opened that the world outside came rushing back.

“As soon as we got off the ambulance,” he recalled, “a woman came up to me and said, ‘Welcome to Israel.’ I looked at her and thought, ‘She’s the one who’s going to give me the news.’”

She did.

“She said, ‘Your parents are waiting for you in Kibbutz Re’im.’ And then she said, ‘And Ziv.’”

Eliya froze. “I couldn’t believe it. I asked her, ‘What do you mean, Ziv? Are you messing with me?’ And she replied, ‘No.’”

That moment broke through every wall built by pain, fear, and trauma. As VIN News reported, “We both started crying uncontrollably, screaming in the car. I told her, ‘You could send me back for another 500 days as long as you tell me one more time that Ziv is alive.’”

It wasn’t just relief—it was resurrection.

Freedom, however, comes with a terrible price. One of the first places Eliya chose to visit after his release was not a home or hospital—but a cemetery.

As reported by Israel’s N12, Eliya went to visit the graves of Amit Ben Avihada, Ziv’s young nephew, and Karin Schwartzman, a close friend. Both had been with them at the Nova party and had died in the shelter—murdered in the same grenade attack that nearly took Eliya and Ziv as well. They were two among 14 others who perished beside them.

It was a sacred pilgrimage of mourning and memory, a confrontation with the finality that spared him but not the others.

Though his physical recovery is progressing, Eliya told Israel’s N12 that the emotional healing is far more elusive. The scarring runs deeper than bruises or shackles. It lies in the dissonance between the horrors of the tunnels and the bustling, indifferent pace of life outside. It’s in the absence of those who never came back. It’s in the knowledge that Alon Ahel, his friend and fellow captive, remains in Gaza.

In this surreal new life, healing becomes an ongoing act of remembrance and resistance.

“Only in our chaotic reality,” VIN News noted poignantly, “could two former hostages reunite like this—between treatments, still trying to process what happened.” What happened to them—two 27-year-olds who went out to dance in a supposedly safe country—remains nearly impossible to grasp.

Perhaps most heartbreaking is the unshakable clarity that has emerged from Eliya and Ziv’s survival. This is not a story simply of survival or reunion—it is a warning.

In Eliya’s journey from a music festival in Re’im to a dark tunnel in Gaza and finally back to Israeli soil, the VIN News report revealed a truth that transcends borders: In this reality, every second is a matter of life and death.

It’s a cry not just for the remaining hostages still trapped below Gaza. It’s a cry for attention, for justice, for a world that often looks away too soon.