Idling away the hours in a darkened room in Gaza with two other hostages, Andrey Kozlov sometimes heard one of his captors on the other side of the door typing away on a laptop.
The man was a constant presence in the apartment, while other guards worked shifts and went out to the market, Mr. Kozlov said in an interview, from a hotel room in a Tel Aviv suburb a month after his rescue from captivity.
The guards were unmasked, but they were careful not to reveal their names, telling the hostages to call them all Muhammad.
To differentiate between them, Mr. Kozlov said the hostages gave them nicknames like Big Muhammad and Little Muhammad. Their main jailer had a rounded face, so they called him “Muhammad H’dudim,” Hebrew slang for “Muhammad Chubby Cheeks.”
Mr. Kozlov, 27, a Russian Israeli, provided an exceptionally detailed account of his total of eight months in captivity, together with Almog Meir Jan, 22, and Shlomi Ziv, 41.
He described being held in six locations in the first two months, finally moving to the apartment in mid-December. In some places, he and the other hostages had only a pail for a toilet and food was scarce. Mr. Kozlov said he lost about 20 pounds.
They were rescued from the apartment, a low-rise concrete residence like the ones where many Gazan families live, on June 8 during an audacious and deadly Israeli commando operation.
Afterward, the Israeli authorities identified the hostages’ main jailer as Abdallah Aljamal, 36, a Hamas operative who moonlighted as a journalist — or vice versa. It was a rare instance of the Israeli security services publicly identifying a kidnapper.
Mr. Aljamal, the one referred to as “Chubby Cheeks,” was writing regular dispatches for The Palestine Chronicle, a U.S.-based online publication, about the war’s terrible human toll on Gazans, as he was holding three kidnapped Israelis at gunpoint in his family’s apartment.
Mr. Kozlov has since identified Mr. Aljamal and several other captors from their photographs posted online and on social media.
All three men were kidnapped from the Nova music festival during the Hamas-led terrorist assault of Oct. 7 on southern Israel. About 250 people were abducted and taken to the Gaza Strip that day, according to Israeli officials.
“I thought maybe it’s the last day of my life,” Mr. Kozlov said of his first hours in Gaza, as images of being shot to death on video ran through his mind.
The three spent the last six months of their ordeal in Mr. Aljamal’s custody, according to Mr. Kozlov, hidden away in a residential building in Nuseirat, in the central Gaza Strip, among the local population.
Mr. Aljamal’s wife, Fatima, 36, their children, Mr. Aljamal’s sister Zainab, 27, and his father, Ahmed, 74, a doctor, all appeared to have been in the apartment when the Israeli commandos stormed it. Citing initial testimony from Nuseirat, Ramy Abdu, of the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a group that often advocates for the Palestinians, reported that Mr. Aljamal, his wife, his father and sister were all killed in the raid.
Mr. Kozlov, Mr. Meir Jan and Mr. Ziv were rescued along with a fourth Israeli, Noa Argamani, 26, who was being held in a nearby apartment block in Nuseirat.
Gaza health officials said more than 270 Palestinians were killed in the raid, while the Israeli military initially put the number at less than 100. Neither side broke down the death toll between civilians and combatants.
Mr. Abdu described Abdallah Aljamal as a journalist, and said he also worked “in public service” as the spokesman for the Hamas-run Ministry of Labor in Gaza. The Government Media Office in Gaza said he had worked for a Hamas-affiliated news agency, Palestine Now.
In an article on its website published a day after the raid, The Palestine Chronicle acknowledged that Mr. Aljamal had been a regular contributor “throughout the war,” but only as a freelancer, and was “neither a staff writer nor a contractor.”
Mr. Kozlov emigrated to Israel alone about 18 months before his abduction. He spoke little Hebrew and was working at the overnight Nova festival as an unarmed member of the security team.
The attack started at 6:29 a.m. with heavy salvos of rockets fired from Gaza. As hundreds of gunmen closed in on the festival site, Mr. Kozlov fled and tried to take cover. He joined up with another Israeli civilian — Mr. Ziv — and then a bearded man in a khaki uniform who was armed with an assault rifle appeared and gestured at them to get into a vehicle.
At first Mr. Kozlov said he mistook him for an Israeli special ops officer coming to save them. But then the gunman made Mr. Ziv drive, got in the back seat and barked directions in Arabic. It soon dawned on Mr. Kozlov that they were driving into Gaza.
They were handed over to other armed men and soon joined by Mr. Meir Jan. Mr. Kozlov said they spent the first days with their hands tied behind their backs with rope, being kicked and slapped around.
Mr. Kozlov said one captor used charades-like motions to tell him that the next day he would shoot him and record the execution on video. When the same captor appeared the following day, he went up to Mr. Kozlov and made a heart shape with his hands, a sign of love.
“I thought, OK, thank you, let’s keep going, we have another chance to survive,” Mr. Kozlov said, recounting the uncertainty and psychological terror that lasted eight months.
The three men were taken to six different locations over the next two months, Mr. Kozlov recalled, shackled the entire time at the wrists and ankles with padlocks and chains. They spent two weeks on the second floor of an unfinished building, and then were moved into the kitchen of a kind of bakery or restaurant. The doctor who received the hostages at the Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv said they all had wasted muscles, were suffering from severe malnourishment and had been abused, physically and psychologically, in various ways.
In mid-December, the three were moved to the Aljamal apartment. It was spacious and divided into two parts, Mr. Kozlov said, with a blanket blocking a large doorway between them.
The captives were in one room, the curtains always drawn over the window. Their guards sat next door in a small anteroom with a television.
Here, their hands and feet were unbound. They were told if they stepped out of line, they would be tied up again as punishment. Mr. Kozlov said there were several children in the apartment. He would hear them playing in the anteroom with their father, who mostly carried a pistol, while the other guards were armed with Kalashnikovs.
He said the three of them received an adequate breakfast and a decent evening meal, an experience at variance with the accounts of other released captives, some of whom also spent time in Hamas’s tunnels. Israeli security officials told The Times that Mr. Aljamal’s wife and father helped keep the hostages, along with other guards.
Mr. Kozlov appeared relaxed and often joked about his experience during the interview. But the humor was black, and the atmosphere he described was one of unrelenting menace.
They played cards a lot, sometimes with their captors, and were given some board games and books, including one of stories from the Quran, according to Mr. Kozlov. Sometimes they were allowed to watch movies on TV in the anteroom, and their captors would call them in on Saturday nights to watch the weekly protests in Tel Aviv calling for their release.
But Mr. Kozlov said they were also told that they were a problem for Israel, and that the military was trying to kill them in their bombardments of Gaza. And if there was a rescue attempt, they were told, their captors would kill them first.
“There was a bit of dissonance, a paradox,” in feeling under threat from both sides, Mr. Kozlov said.
Mr. Aljamal had extreme mood swings. One day he might be playing cards with the hostages and joking around with them. “Another day he could wake up and say ‘I hate you, I hate you,’” Mr. Kozlov said, imitating his captor in a gruff voice.
Mr. Kozlov focused on surviving by writing and repeating mantras to himself in Russian, such as “You are alive; every day a gift,” and “My family is waiting for me, alive, whole and well.”
The morning of the rescue Mr. Kozlov was reading when he heard explosions. Big Muhammad forgot his Kalashnikov and was shot and killed as he tried to run into the hostages’ room. Mr. Aljamal was lying in a pool of blood near the bathroom, said Mr. Kozlov.
The commandos burst in shouting, “Name, name, name” at the hostages, who identified themselves. Within seconds, surrounded by Israeli forces, they were out on the stairwell.
For Mr. Kozlov, the rescue was “incredible, unbelievable.” Once in the helicopter, as he saw Gaza receding into the distance, “I started to cry,” he said. “Then after a minute I started to laugh.”
Overwhelmed with emotion on meeting the people closest to him, he said, “You don’t have words.”
When his parents arrived from Russia to reunite with him at the hospital, footage showed him falling to his knees, sobbing.
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