From Luis Har’s upbeat manner, it’s hard to believe that eight months ago he was abducted from his home and subsequently spent five months without sunlight in Hamas captivity.
But the 71-year-old’s smile disappears as he recalls the moment the women he was held hostage with – his girlfriend Clara Marman, her sister and her niece – were driven away from the safe house in Rafah where they had been held for almost 60 days, leaving him and Clara’s brother Fernando Merman alone in captivity.
“We, the boys, were holding up and cheering up the girls but the moment the door closed: Boom, we broke down and had a cry,” Luis says. Despite immense hope that his girlfriend and family would be free: “I had to say to myself: maybe I will never see them again.”
With 128 Israelis abducted from southern Gaza still in Hamas captivity, Luis counts himself lucky. He was one of the two hostages rescued by the Israeli Defence Forces in a daring operation in February when Israeli commandos blasted their way into the house where they were held captive.
Today, wearing a black T-shirt with the words “Bring them home” emblazoned across the front, he is at the Tel Aviv headquarters of The Hostages Families Forum, a group set up to advocate for the hostages release. He says he “can’t sit at home and do nothing” while others from southern Israel are still in captivity.
Almost eight months after the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel, only 121 hostages have got out alive. Most (81 Israelis and 24 foreign nationals), like Clara and her relatives, were released in the cease-fire deal in November.
Only three have been rescued by the IDF – Luis, Fernando, and Ori Megidish back in October. (Sixteen hostages have been confirmed dead and three were killed by friendly fire as they tried to escape.)
It was on the morning of the fifth day of the November cease-fire deal when the Hamas captors told Clara and the two other women hostages they were to be released. “Clara came to me and said: ‘I’m not going without you. We came as a family and we will leave as a family’,” Luis remembers.
He had to convince his girlfriend that she should not derail the deal and that he and Fernando would follow them soon. Today, recalling that moment of separation from Clara, Luis eyes well up with tears. For the only time during the interview he needs to pause.
Later on that November day, the two elderly men were brought a TV by their captors and saw Clara and the other women look dazed and terrified as they were handed over by masked Hamas fighters to Red Cross employees and moved to Israel.
“We were so happy! This was actually happening,” Luis says.
The longer they stayed at the house, sleeping on paper-thin mattresses – Luis says “you could feel the floor” at night – the closer the war was getting to them. IDF bombings soon spread to the south of Gaza near Rafah, and the hostages learnt how to tell a faraway explosion from bombs falling close by. One morning, their captors told them a building 200 metres away was bombed, killing civilians inside.
There were other sounds of the disaster too. One day, Luis heard a commotion outside. Screams, shouts and a distinctive buzz of a hundred people. Traumatised by a brush with an angry mob outside the kibbutz on October 7, he was scared the locals were out to lynch the hostages. It was just a delivery of flour at a time when Gaza was running out of food, his captors told him.
For 76 days after the women were released Luis and Fernando kept counting days and told each other the most intimate stories of their lives. Then at 2am on February 12, after 129 days in captivity, Luis was jolted from this sleep by an explosion. The door separating them from the captors flew out. It was pitch-black.
As Luis tried to crawl away towards the door, someone grabbed his leg and said in Hebrew: “Luis, this is the IDF. We’ve come to bring you back.”
“That was the moment I felt peace,” he says. He still remembers the odd sensation when he was full of joy at being rescued, but his body was contorted with pain: “For me it was a kidnapping – that’s how my body reacted.” Four IDF soldiers took Luis and Fernando and brought them out to the balcony as Luis saw smoke and fire all around him.
“We were running to the car and I said to the soldiers: ‘Are you sure we’re not in a movie?’ He said: ‘No, Luis, we’re going to bring you home’.”
Luis was then put into a helicopter and taken to Tel Hashomer Hospital in Ramat Gan, on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. Soon he was in the embrace of his family – who had only been told of the mission once the rescue had been a success. The euphoric moment was caught on camera.
“That photo symbolises family and a miracle,” Luis said at the time. “My heart was bursting with happiness back with my family.”
It was only after his release that Luis understood the scale of October 7. One of their captors had told him that over 1,200 Israelis were killed on October 7, but he says it was hard to believe it could be true. “When I came back, at first they would not let me watch TV.
“But slowly, every day I’d find out about my children’s friends who had been killed or kidnapped. I began to understand what had happened. I know it was hell for so many people. There was violence and sexual abuse. We were lucky [there was no physical abuse] but not everyone was.”
Luis moved to Israel from Argentina in his early 20s and became an accountant, but he has since retired and would spend his days folk dancing and cooking for friends and family. On October 7, the final day of a week-long Sukkot holiday, Luis was with his girlfriend Clara, her brother, sister and niece at Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak, a few kilometres from the border separating Israel from Gaza’s city of Khan Younis.
Luis lived in another kibbutz 20 minutes away: he and Clara have been together for 22 years, but have separate households. “This is how we’ve been able to stay together!” Luis says with a smile.
Everyone was annoyed when the first air raid siren rang out at about 6.30am, but dutifully went to the safe room of the house. The first siren was followed by another, and then one more. It was then they realised something was wrong.
While Luis and Clara’s relatives were in the kitchen, collecting orange cake and water to take to the safe room, they caught a glimpse of news on TV, showing a Hamas pick-up truck cruising around the Israeli town of Sderot, a few miles away to the north, and heard reports of a terrorist infiltration in Be’eri.
They saw white smoke billowing outside the windows. Attackers set cars on fire outside the gate – as it later turned out it was a tactic to lure out the kibbutz’s first responders. Shortly after the family locked the door to the safe room, they started hearing noises inside the house, glass shuttering, men rushing around.
“They’re coming in,” was the last thing Luis texted to his daughter [one of his four children] who lives on the other side of the country. Before he knew it, masked and armed attackers stormed the safe room and started shooting as the five of them lay on the floor, holding each other. When the terrorists dragged them out of the house, Luis saw scenes of chaos and devastation.
“Crowds of people were coming into our house and coming out with loot as if it was their own, I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Luis says. He tried to keep his calm when a masked man with a machine gun grabbed him and started shouting at him in Arabic.
While the breach of the border was carefully planned and even rehearsed at Hamas’s training grounds inside Gaza, multiple reports suggest that Hamas themselves were taken by surprise at how easy it was to break through the $1 billion fence with Israel and catch the Israeli army unawares.
The Hamas terrorists on pick-up trucks and paragliders were soon followed by mobs of Gazans who destroyed property, looted homes and helped to kidnap the Israelis.
Luis and his girlfriend’s brother Fernando were taken to the hole in the kibbutz’s fence while Clara, her sister and her niece were put in a car and driven outside.
After a shouting match between two groups of Hamas fighters, who Luis believes did not know whether to take them hostages or where to take them to, the five Spanish-speaking Israelis, all hailing from Argentina, were put together in a white Toyota pick-up truck and driven through the fields separating Israel and Gaza.
Out in the field, Luis saw a stream of Gazan civilians on the rampage. One of them spotted the hostages in the back of the car and went at them with a pair of large garden shears.
“They wanted to kill us,” Luis says, as he counts it one of the most horrifying moments of his ordeal. Once they were in Gaza, the group of Israelis were taken down a tunnel. They were in near-complete darkness for over three hours while their captors would occasionally stop to check the map.
Luis assumed this is where they would be kept: “Every metal door they’d open – I thought: ‘This is it’. I didn’t believe they were leading us outside.”
Luis, who has retained his upbeat personality, could not stop cracking jokes even in the middle of that horrific journey. When asked by his captors in the tunnels if they were Jews, he yelled: “Argentina! Messi! Messi!” Eventually they were taken to a gated house in the southern city of Rafah and into a darkened room.
It was this cheerful disposition that helped Luis through his 129 days in captivity.
The five hostages, all of Argentinian background, decided to speak Spanish among themselves to keep some privacy from their captors. They even came up with nicknames for their four guards.
With one of them, nicknamed Master of the House, Luis developed a bond.
While others were hostile and bragged about Hamas killing Israelis, the Master of the House, who at 41 was the same age as Luis’ son, talked to them “as humans”.
“Between us, we spoke a bit of Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish and English. We talked with our hands, legs. We talked!” says Luis, who has a rich range of hand gestures. Luis could not help cracking jokes, even with the Master of the House. Fernando would say: “You’re crazy. They’re going to kill us!”
But it was a survival strategy. Luis and Fernando also tried to engage with the Hamas guards to shield the women from any direct interaction. It was only after they were released, they found out that some Israeli women in Hamas captivity were victims of sexual violence.
Luis counts himself lucky that neither him nor anyone in his group was subject to physical or sexual violence. In an earlier interview, Luis spoke about being treated “as if we were animals or dogs” by the men who kidnapped him from the kibbutz.
In Gaza, three of the four captors used to taunt the hostages and play mind tricks with them, including asking Clara’s 21-year-old niece to choose who she would like to see released first.
Three days after their abduction, Luis started cooking for the whole house – both hostages and their guards. Provisions were ample at the start, before Israel imposed a blockade. The Hamas fighters enjoyed Luis’ shakshuka and kept asking for pizza – one of his trademark dishes, which he used to cook for his extended family in an outdoor oven.
At the safe house in Rafah, Luis would make the dough and the filling and the pizza would be taken out to be baked in an oven somewhere outside. Soon, food started to run out and the hostages would have canned green beans and pita.
Once the women were released, the two retired men, who had known each other for 30 years, would pass the time talking about their lives and plans for the future.
“When we got depressed, one would say to the other: ‘Let’s talk about food – what we’re going to cook for New Year’s Eve’,” he says.
“We would mark every day in captivity. We used to say at the end of each day: now we have one day less in captivity. We knew we’d be going out. We just didn’t know when.”
Luis also tried to search for signs of life everywhere even though he was forced to live inside for almost five months. Once Luis spotted a couple of sparrows that made a nest in between stones in a building nearby. “It was something I used to look at every day.” Luis found it symbolic: Sparrow in Hebrew is “dror” which also means “liberty”.
Now he finally has that liberty, but the trauma is very much still with him. He jumps every time he hears a loud thud or the roar of a motorcycle. “It takes me a few seconds to realise I’m here and I’m okay. But my body takes me back there,” he says.
He is also yet to return home. Luis and Clara are now staying at a friend’s house in Herzliya, a peaceful town on the Mediterranean Sea while fighting rages on in Gaza just 75 kilometres down the coast. In some southern communities, which were not overrun by Hamas, residents have gradually moved back, but over 100,000 Israelis are still displaced.
Luis says he cannot face the prospect of moving back to his home on Kibbutz Urim. Six residents were killed in Clara’s kibbutz of Nir Yitzhak. Urim was miraculously spared the attack while Hamas fighters were on a rampage in Be’eri and other kibbutzim nearby.
But Luis is dancing again – Israeli folk dances – which he says helps distract his mind. He is also helping the Hostages Families Forum, which is advocating for international governments to call on Hamas to release the hostages and also pressing the Israeli government to reach a deal.
His thoughts are still very much with those still in captivity. “It’s terrible to be out there: no medicine, no food,” he says, also citing reports of physical violence and sexual abuse of the Israeli hostages.
“I’m alive. I’m here. We need to fight for others.”
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