Freed Israeli hostage says she endured ‘psychological warfare’ during 50 days of Hamas captivity
Doron Katz Asher said her daughters can “remember every little detail” about October 7.
How they woke to the sound of sirens and hid in their shelter. How the gunshots got nearer. How, when the doors burst open, their grandfather rushed out of the shelter so Hamas gunmen wouldn’t see the rest of them hiding inside. How he was taken. How they left the door open to the shelter in the hope other attackers would think it had already been raided and move on. How that didn’t work.
“Another terrorist unit entered and took us also,” Asher said.
Asher, 34, and her daughters were taken into Gaza, where they were kept first in a home, then in a hospital, before being released in November during a temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
Asher described her nearly 50 days in captivity, the “psychological warfare” to which she was subjected, the conditions in which she was kept, and her sense of guilt after being freed while scores of others – including 79-year-old Gadi Moses, her daughters’ grandfather – remain in captivity.
After being exposed to the October 7 terror attack that she called a “war movie,” Asher said she tried to reassure her daughters the danger was over. “I told them there are no terrorists anymore and we’re with good people now who are guarding us until we can return home,” she said.
The three of them were watched over every hour of the day by children and grandchildren of the owner of the house. Asher never learned their names, but was able to communicate with the father, whom she said spoke Hebrew as he used to work in Israel.
While Asher and her daughters were not harmed physically, she said she was subjected to “psychological warfare.”
“They didn’t give us a lot of information, they mainly tried to say that Hamas wants to release us but in Israel no one cares about us,” Asher said. “That we won’t return to live in the kibbutz because it’s not our house – it’s not the place where we belong.”
But she said she did not believe them – and that the sound of fighting outside the building in Gaza was “how we knew that something was going on in order to get us back home, to put pressure on Hamas to release us.”
After 16 days, Asher and her daughters were taken from the apartment to what she described as a “so-called” hospital in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis. Why “so-called”?
Because a hospital is “a place that is supposed to take care of people, but instead it was taken over by Hamas and they used it to hide hostages,” Asher said.
The Israeli military has repeatedly said Hamas hides terrorist infrastructure in and around civilian institutions in Gaza, such as hospitals – a claim denied by the militant group. The US has said that Hamas used the Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest in Gaza, as a command center and a place to hold hostages. Asher did not say where she was held.
Asher was joined by other hostages in the hospital complex – the first captives she had met since being taken into Gaza.
She said she received some medication when her daughters became sick while being kept inside, “but it wasn’t enough.”
When Aviv contracted a fever, Asher put her in the sink with cold water to bring her temperature down. “She was screaming. They would tell us to keep quiet, but the girl had a fever and I had to take care of her somehow.” They remained in the hospital for nearly five weeks.
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