On Monday, Hamas released a hostage video showing three kidnapped Israeli women sitting on plastic chairs against a blank wall. For a relative of Rimon Kirsht Buchshtav, who was among the women shown, the harrowing footage was the first clear sign that she was still alive.
On October 7, Rimon, 36, and her husband, Yagev Buchshtav, 34 — who met in high school and will marry in 2021 — were kidnapped from their home during a Hamas terror attack on Israel that killed around 1,400 Israelis. injured thousands and saw hundreds more taken hostage in what proved to be the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
While hiding in a safe room inside her home in Kibbutz Nirim, an agricultural community located in southern Israel near the Gaza border, Rimon texted her family that she saw fire and terrorists shooting “everywhere” outside.
Rimon sent her mother – who took refuge with her father in a nearby community – one last voice message. “She says, ‘I love you, Mom. I’m so sorry I can’t be there with you. I love you.’ And that’s the last we’ve heard from Rimon,” her sister-in-law Yael Nidam Kirsht tells PEOPLE.
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Rimon and Yagen during the wedding on 12.3.21. “The date was chosen because of their love of numbers and puzzles,” says her brother Lotham.
courtesy of the Kirsht family
Israeli father recalls panicked phone call before his wife and two girls were abducted and taken to Gaza
A week later, the Israeli military told the Kirsht family that they believed both Rimon and Yagev had been kidnapped and taken to Gaza. But “until that video came from Hamas, we couldn’t tell what happened to them,” says Yael, who is married to Rimon’s brother Lotem and is currently studying for a Ph.D. In the United States of America.
“We didn’t know because in [safe] there were signs of a struggle in the room — blood, bullet holes,” she says, adding that in a tight-knit community, “so many people were killed and burned and bodies mutilated. So at that moment it was impossible to tell who was alive and who was dead.”
After the Hamas attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared his country “at war” with the Gaza-based group, which the US considers a terrorist organization, and launched a series of revenge attacks on the Gaza Strip, killing more than 9,000 Palestinians so far, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. .
Hamas returned only four of what the Israel Defense Forces believed were more than 230 hostages, and one soldier hostage was rescued in a special IDF operation.
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posting a recording. A hostage video released by Hamas shows – (L-R) Rimon Buchshtav Kirsht (36), Danielle Aloni (44), Lena Trupanov (50).
Dan Kitwood/Getty
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Monday’s hostage video brought little comfort to the Kirsht family. “I could see Rimon there, but I don’t know when that video was taken,” says Yael. “I only know for sure that the terrorist organization that killed 1,400 people, raped women and beheaded babies held my sister-in-law.”
“I don’t know what her status is now,” adds Yael. “I don’t know if she’s dead or alive. All I can see in that video is that she was very, very thin. I also saw that she wasn’t wearing glasses, so she couldn’t see anything for the past 24 days.”
Yael worries that there is no sign of Yagev on the hostage video. The two “were always attached to each other,” she says. “I don’t know why women are separated from men and what is happening to women right now. I am absolutely terrified.”
The Kirsht family is primarily asking the Israeli government to make the safe return of the hostages “the top priority of everything that’s going on,” Yael says. “The sanity in Israel, due to the fact that the army was not there to protect those who were killed, is heartbreaking. The least we can ask now is that our loved ones return to us immediately. That should be the first priority, and in fact, as far as we’re concerned, the only priority.”
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Rimon Kirsht Buchshtav, far right, her husband Yagev Buchshtav, Yael Nidam Kirsht, bottom left, and Lotem at the 2022 picnic.
courtesy of the Kirsht family
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The family is also asking for the involvement of the Red Cross operating in Gaza “to supply the hostages with medicine.” [and] to share the hostage situation with us,” says Yael. “There are hostages from 33 different countries. They all deserve to be seen by the Red Cross.”
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The hostage video released on Monday shows two other women, identified as Jelena Trupanov and Daniel Aloni.
Aloni, 44, is believed to have been abducted with her daughter, sister, brother-in-law and her three-year-old twin nieces. In the video, she condemns the Israeli government for allowing the attack and demands that Netanyahu participate in a prisoner exchange and free the estimated 6,000 Hamas members being held in Israeli jails, according to CBS News. Rimon’s sister-in-law believes that those words were dictated by Hamas.
»I’m one hundred percent sure she was [coerced],” she says. “There’s no way in hell you get kidnapped by a murderous terrorist organization, held at gunpoint, and then not given a script of what you’re supposed to say.”
Yael adds: “The abuse does not stop. Not only are they taking our loved ones, but now they are using our loved ones as part of their propaganda to share their narrative, their story, whatever they want to say using our people. It is their tool, they are pawns in this very cruel game.”
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Source: HIS Education