Portraits of Survival: The Israeli Hostages Who Made It Home

On Oct. 7, Chen Goldstein-Almog was one of the around 250 hostages taken into Gaza after the Hamas-led attacks on Israel, alongside her three younger children.

Now she is among more than 100 who have returned to Israel.

The New York Times followed more than a dozen former hostages for several weeks as they tried to rebuild their lives, campaign for the return of those still in Gaza and mourn for those who were killed.

Chen, 49, lost her husband, Nadav, and her eldest daughter, Yam, 20, in the attacks.

Keren Munder, 54, and her son, Ohad, were held for 49 days, mostly, they say, in a hospital.

Ohad turned 9 there. On his birthday, the guards moved some other captive children into the same small examination room. He was happy to be around more boys, he said, but the little girls cried “a lot.”

Keren’s father remains a hostage, a fact marked by a black label across his mailbox at Kibbutz Nir Oz. Blue means returned; red, killed.

Andrey Koslov, 27, was among four hostages rescued by Israeli forces in a raid in central Gaza in June. Gaza health officials said that over 270 Palestinians were killed in the raid, while the Israeli military put the number at fewer than 100.

“It was absolutely unbelievable,” he said, “because we didn’t expect anything and a miracle happened to us.”

He pinches himself almost every day, he said, to check that he is not still dreaming in captivity.

When gunmen came for Mia Leimberg, 17, and her mother, Gabriela, 60, Mia held onto her dog, Bella. “I knew that they would kill her if I left her,” she said.

They and Mia’s aunt, Clara Marman, 60, were released after 53 days, leaving behind Clara’s partner, Louis Har, 70, and brother, Fernando Simon Marman, 60.

The two men were rescued months later in an army raid. “As soon as they said our names,” Fernando said of the rescue team, “I felt like the safest person on Earth.”

Margalit Moses, 78, was held with a group of prisoners who needed medication. She would speak to her captors in Arabic, asking for what others needed.

Released on the 49th day, she said goodbye to the guards and invited them for coffee “when peace comes.”

“Now that I’ve heard the horror stories of those who came back,” she said, “I understand I was kept in conditions others did not have.”

Images of a kidnapped Sapir Cohen, 29, on the back of a motorbike flashed around the world. “We were inside Gaza very quickly,” she said. “The streets were filled with people cheering the people who abducted me. They all came close to me, all wanting to touch me, to hit me.”

But during her 55 days of captivity, her most urgent question was about her partner, Sasha Troufanov, 28, who was also taken. “I asked every hostage I met in the tunnels if they had maybe seen Sasha,” she said. “None of them said they had.”

Still, she said, “This doesn’t make my hope go away. I believe he is alive and that he’ll come back.”

As their captors moved Danielle Alony, 45, and her daughter Emilia, 6, from site to site, “we used everything we could possibly find to turn it into a game,” Danielle said. “But there were so many dead hours of pure uncertainty and I needed to keep Emilia busy all the time.”

Mostly Emilia drew. After Sapir Cohen, who was held alongside Danielle and Emilia, spoke about her missing partner, Emilia drew a picture of their future wedding day. Sapir told her it would go on the invitations.

Since being released, Danielle said, “Emilia has been noticing people who carry weapons — she is more sensitive to noises that remind her of certain sounds, like thunder that reminds her of bombings.”

Chen Goldstein-Almog and her three surviving children were mostly held in a room in an apartment in Gaza, she said in an interview with The Times last year. But she said the heavily armed captors also moved them to various apartments, tunnels, a mosque, even a destroyed supermarket.

She would talk with her captors, sometimes for hours, she said, maybe because she was once a social worker and knew how to keep people in long, deep conversations.

That was her only way of trying to ensure, she said, that she and the children would be safe.

Itay Regev, 19, and Moran Stela Yanai, 40, were both abducted at the Nova music festival. Itay was taken alongside his sister, Maya, and another man, Omer Shem-Tov; Moran was taken alone after breaking her leg while trying to flee.

“Nothing has been the same since I’m back,” she said through tears. “I feel I’m on a mission to bring everyone back.”

“I would rather forget about everything that happened to us,” Itay said. “All I want is for Omer and everyone else to return.”

Mediators are shuttling across the Middle East this week for another round of talks focused on ending the war in Gaza and releasing the hostages. Negotiations have been mostly stalled for weeks.

Amit Soussana, 40, was the first former Israeli hostage to say publicly that she had been sexually assaulted while in captivity.

“You’re there with him and you know that every moment it can happen again,” she said in an interview with The Times in March, describing the captor who assaulted her. “You’re completely dependent on him.”

Hamas has denied that its members sexually abused captives; a United Nations report found “convincing information” that some hostages suffered sexual violence.

Raz Ben-Ami, 57, was abducted with her husband, Ohad, who remains in Gaza. Until her release after 54 days, she didn’t know the fate of her three daughters. When she heard that they were safe, she said, “it felt like giving birth to them again.”

“I don’t care about my house — none of that matters. The only important thing is for Ohad to come back,” she said, adding: “It’s still hard for me to imagine our life after this.”

One way that former hostages have sought to retake control is by campaigning for others’ release.

Even before their return, the main protest site in Tel Aviv had become known as Hostages’ Square. Now former hostages often lead the gatherings there.