Aviva Siegel’s voice breaks repeatedly as she talks about her husband, Keith, 75, an American citizen from North Carolina, who has been held hostage in Gaza since October 7. Aviva was also taken that day and was freed in November as part of a short-lived ceasefire.
“Keith and I have been married for 43 years,” she told The Jerusalem Report in a Zoom interview. “He has always been there for me, and now these past months he’s thrown on a mattress like a rag and I’m not there for him. It’s very difficult knowing what he’s going through.”
She has repeatedly imagined their first minutes together after Keith is released from more than 10 months of Hamas captivity. “When he comes out, the first thing I’m going to say is that I’m sorry that it took so long [to get him released],” she said, her voice breaking. “But I have been doing everything I can to bring Keith home and all of the hostages home.”
That has included meeting with US President Joe Biden twice, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken “at least six times.” She was at the meeting in Washington in July with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he addressed Congress. She has become a fixture at Hostages Square in Tel Aviv and speaks to groups about her experiences.
Aviva and Keith lived on Kibbutz Kfar Aza for decades. She was born in South Africa and came to Israel at the age of nine, although she still speaks English with a pronounced South African accent. Keith had come from the US to volunteer at Kibbutz Gezer, where Aviva was spending a year of pre-army volunteer service working as a preschool teacher. They met, married, and moved to Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where they raised four children, and now have five grandchildren.
Kfar Aza was established in 1951 by Jewish immigrants from Egypt and Morocco and is just two kilometers from the border between Israel and Gaza. Aviva still finds it hard to believe what happened there on October 7.
Taken hostage by Hamas on October 7
When they heard the first sirens, she and Keith went into the safe room in their home. After a while, they thought they were safe and looked out the window at all the rockets heading to Tel Aviv. Quickly they returned to the safe room.
“Then we heard the terrorists in the house, and we heard them open the door of our shelter,” she said. “Keith saved our lives. He put his head on his knees and his hands on his head, while I stood up and started screaming. Fifteen terrorists tried to shove themselves into the safe room – smiling, as if it was a party for them. I remember I couldn’t even feel my body. Keith was saying, ‘We have to run away,’ and I said, ‘Keith, they’ve got the guns pointed at us, they’ve got knives in front of our faces, how can we run away?’ And he said, ‘They’re going to take us to Gaza.’ And I said, ‘OK, we’ll go to Gaza.’ That just shows how disconnected I was.”
Eighty members of Kfar Aza (more than 10 percent of the total population of the kibbutz) were killed and 18 taken hostage. The Siegels were kidnapped to Gaza in their own car. On the way, the terrorists pushed Keith hard, breaking several of his ribs.
“They also shot us, and one of the bullets hit Keith,” Aviva said. “I was the only one who took care of Keith for at least five weeks. He could hardly move, the poor thing. They threatened him that he had to sit up, and I begged them, ‘Just give him five minutes to relax the pain,’ but they didn’t.”
She described the difficult conditions in captivity, although being kept together with Keith gave her some comfort. “They were so mean and brutal, eating in front of us and starving us,” she said. “They didn’t give us any water, hitting us, taking us underneath the ground 40 meters and just leaving us there because there was no oxygen. Imagine what it’s like to lie on a mattress that stinks and just trying to breathe.”
At one point, she said, she lost hope in the future. She was lying on a mattress in a tunnel and so weak she couldn’t even lift her head.
“You think what will happen if Keith dies and you say to yourself, ‘I hope I die before Keith,’ or you want to tell the terrorists, ‘Just kill me’ because it was difficult every minute. Every minute you feel like you’re going to die or they’re going to kill you, or the bombs are going to kill you or their rockets might fall on you.”
Soon afterwards, they were taken out of the tunnel. “I’ll never forget the moment they took us out and I took a huge breath, and I looked at Keith and said, ‘We’re going to live.’ We had air, and we felt so lucky; but we didn’t know how unlucky we were. They took us straight to a house where the terrorists were so mean. I don’t understand how people can behave like that.”
In an interview on Channel 12 television several weeks before, Aviva said that many of the young girls were sexually assaulted. In one case, she said, three young women were allowed to take a shower but only if the terrorists watched.
During the 51 days in Gaza they were held in captivity, she and Keith were moved 13 times, she said, until she was freed, leaving Keith behind. She said she had tried to convince her Hamas kidnappers to allow Keith to leave with her, but they refused. Even after all she has been through, Aviva still has compassion for Palestinians in Gaza who are suffering.
“I’m against wars. I’m a peacemaker,” she said. “When I think about Gaza women having babies in tents, it breaks my heart. And what’s happening to the people in Israel breaks by heart, too. They have to do everything they can to bring the hostages home because it’s cruel and inhuman what they are going through.”
The last sign of life from Keith came in April in a Hamas propaganda video, which she couldn’t bring herself to watch. Keith is shown looking pale and thin, with two other hostages. At the end of the video, Keith breaks down in tears.
Israel recently recovered the bodies of six of the hostages from a tunnel in Khan Yunis. It had previously been known that five of the six were dead, and there had been suspicion that the sixth had also died. But all of them, like Keith, were alive when they were taken to Gaza.
Of the 110 remaining hostages in Gaza, it is not clear how many are still alive, although intelligence officials believe it is between 30 and 40. For their loved ones, each hostage is a whole world. In August, Blinken came back to the region, warning that this might be the last chance for a deal that would end the war and bring the hostages home.
“I can’t allow myself to feel that this would be the last time. I need to keep hope that Keith will come home, if not tomorrow then the day after with all the other hostages,” Aviva said, her voice breaking again. “I’m sore, my body’s sore. My heart is sore. I’m broken up into pieces. Just thinking about Keith there and begging and begging and begging to get out of there and maybe losing his hope.”■