‘I left him behind’: Freed hostage fear for father, still in Gaza

In the 52 days that Sahar Kalderon, 16, spent as a hostage in Gaza, it was not just her captors who terrified her.

It was also the brutal Israeli attacks on the enclave, she said, as the Israeli air force pounded the area night after night. one of the most intense air campaigns this century.

“I have often said to myself that in the end I will die by Israel’s rockets and not by Hamas,” the teenager said in her first interview with the international news media since she was fired. released from captivity on November 27.

“Will I ever see my family again?” she remembered wondering. “Do I return to my normal life? Won’t I be killed? It is total helplessness.”

It is this kind of sentiment that highlights Israel’s strategic bind as it tries to free more people captured by Hamas and its allies in the October 7 attacks in southern Israel.

Israel began its devastating counterattack on Gaza shortly after the attack, attempting to rescue the approximately 240 hostages while destroying the group that led their kidnapping. The two-pronged strategy worked initially, as the Israeli army captured large parts of northern Gaza before coming to terms a short truce in November to allow the release of more than 100 hostages. Ms. Kalderon and her brother Erez, 12, were Amongst them.

But as Israeli forces push deeper into Gaza, there are fears that the fight against Hamas will come at the expense of the fight against Hamas remaining 129 hostages are still being held in Gaza, 21 of whom are already believed dead. Last week, three Israeli hostages were accidentally shot dead by the army with an improvised white flag.

For Ms. Kalderon, the fear is particularly acute because she believes her father, Ofer Kalderon, 53, is still a hostage.

“What about my father, who stayed behind?” she said. “I ask everyone who sees this: please stop this war; Get all the hostages out.”

Ms. Kalderon gathered for an interview on Sunday in Tel Aviv, far from her destroyed village in southern Israel. Surrounded by her mother and siblings in an apartment loaned to her family by the government, Ms. Kalderon appeared cheerful and collected — an exterior that masked deep trauma, her mother said.

She last saw her father on the morning of October 7, when terrorists stormed their village, Nir Oz, close to the Gaza border. It was one of more than two dozen communities and military bases overrun by Hamas that day. An estimated 1,200 people were killed in the rampage, Israeli officials say.

Ms Kalderon, an avid painter and dancer, was at the home of her father – a carpenter and cyclist – and her brother Erez when the attack began. Her parents live separately; Mrs. Kalderon’s mother, Hadas, was at her own home in the same village at the time.

When the attackers entered her father’s home, Ms. Kalderon said, she fled through a window with her brother and father and hid in a thick bush. She and her father removed the white shirts they were wearing to make themselves less visible, Ms. Kalderon said.

Through the holes in the leaves, she said, she witnessed the plundering of her village. Crowds of Gazans poured through Nir Oz, firing weapons, burning houses and looting whatever they could find, she said.

“Bicycles, tractors, mattresses, refrigerators, motorcycles, television sets, everything,” Ms. Kalderon recalled. “I see the terrorists with bags full of stuff in their hands.” The Israeli army was nowhere to be seen.

Two hours passed. Her legs went numb after squatting for so long. “I see all this and I just think, how did this happen?” she said. “I sit in the bush and just pray and hope they don’t catch us.”

But they were spotted and fled the bush. Mrs. Kalderon, with her legs barely moving, could not keep up. She soon found herself separated from her father and brother.

One gunman shot at her legs but missed, Ms. Kalderon said. And then she came across a group of ten armed adults in civilian clothes and two children. Two people lifted her onto some kind of motorcycle or scooter, she recalled, before driving her toward Gaza, screaming.

Along the way, she saw things that were beyond comprehension, she said. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Gazans had crossed the border, which was only a few hundred meters from the village.

“The motorcycle went through the fields, and there were also thousands of terrorists, people, civilians of Gaza,” she said. “Tractors and pickup trucks, things from our homes. I saw many small children and mothers from Gaza. Collisions. People come up to me to hit me.”

As they entered Gaza, she said, “I have never felt such fear. I was terrified.”

Ms. Kalderon was reluctant to reveal much about who took her hostage and where, after warnings from Israeli security services that such details could endanger the hostages remaining in Gaza. But she described her seven weeks of captivity as a period of great hunger amid widespread food shortages in Gaza and insecurity.

As more and more released hostages begin to speak publicly about their time in Gaza, it has become clear that each hostage’s experience was different. Some were held in Hamas’s underground tunnel network, others in hospitals and private homes. Some have said they were allowed to listen to the radio or kept informed of the outside world by their captors.

But not Mrs. Kalderon. She was kept separated from her relatives, she said. She didn’t know her grandmother and cousin had been killed on October 7, and she didn’t know what happened to Erez and her father, Ofer.

“I didn’t know how many hostages there were,” she added. “I thought it was me and the people I was with.”

Because there was no daylight where she was held, she lost her sense of time. “I didn’t know anything about who’s alive and who’s dead,” she said. “I also felt like I had been forgotten,” she added.

The news that she would be released came as a surprise, Ms. Kalderon said; she was told only an hour before it happened. When she was taken to a white van, Erez, again to her surprise, was waiting – 52 days after she last saw him.

“I started crying,” she said. “And I said to myself, ‘At least I got it.’”

They were driven through the streets of Gaza, she said, and handed over to representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, who took them out of Gaza.

Back in Israel, reunited with her mother, sister and older brother, she initially felt a wave of relief. But then she realized her father was still in Gaza, and questions started running through her mind, she said.

“How is he doing?” she remembered wondering. “Is he well? What is he feeling? Who is he with; How is he being kept?” She added: “I felt I was leaving him behind.”

Nearly a month later, both Ms. Kalderon and Erez are deeply traumatized, suffering from insomnia and experiencing panic attacks, according to their mother.

“They lost their childhood,” their mother said. “They are afraid that there are terrorists behind every door in the house.”

Only their father’s return can help them heal, she said, adding, “We know he is alive.” We want him back alive.”

Johnatan Reiss, Carmit Hoomash And David Blumenfeld reporting contributed.