Following her rescue by the Israeli army, new details have emerged about the circumstances in which a 26-year-old woman, Noa Argamani, was held hostage in the Gaza Strip.
Israeli news website ynet wrote on Monday that the young woman had been taken from apartment to apartment in the Gaza Strip by her captors after her abduction from the Nova music festival on October 7.
On Saturday, she and three other hostages were released in a dramatic military operation. According to the army, there were heavy clashes with armed Palestinians. The Hamas-controlled health authority says 274 Palestinians were killed during the operation.
After her kidnapping, Argamani was held with two male hostages who were later killed, the news site reported. One is believed to have been killed in an Israeli attack, while the other was murdered by the kidnappers.
Ynet reported that Argamani told her family that she saw a rocket hit the house and was afraid for her life.
According to reports, Argamani learned good Arabic during her time as a hostage. This made her a kind of ‘representative’ of other female hostages with whom she was temporarily held.
Argamani, who according to Israeli sources was freed from an apartment owned by Palestinian civilians in the Nuseirat refugee district, had to cook and wash dishes for the family.
Since her release after 246 days of captivity, Argamani has been intensively involved in the care of her mother in the hospital, the news site continues. The woman, from China, is terminally ill and has a fourth-degree brain tumor.
Over the past few months, she had repeatedly asked to see her daughter again. On Sunday, Argamani was alone with her mother in the treatment room for two hours. Her aunts had also traveled from China to meet her.
The father had reported that the mother had barely been able to respond to her daughter during the first conversation on Saturday due to her weakening condition.
“I think she understood that Noa had been released,” the father said. “She just couldn’t tell her what she wanted to tell her for eight months.”
