STORY: ::Israeli Army handout
“First she said ‘Where’s my mom?’ And then she saw me and she hugged me, and she was crying and I was crying, and I was telling her that I was holding her and that I’m not leaving her.”
After 15 months in captivity in Gaza, Romi Gonen and her mom Meirav Leshem Gonen were finally reunited on January 19 –
::Israeli Army handout
– a moment captured by Israeli Army cameras.
Before that their last contact by phone on October 7, 2023 ended with the sound of her abductors saying: ‘She’s alive, let’s take her.’
:: South First Responders via Telegram
Romi, then aged 23, was one of 251 people taken hostage in southern Israel, while she was at the Nova music festival.
:: South First Responders via Telegram
According to police, 364 people were shot, bludgeoned or burned to death at the event near Kibbutz Reim.
“All the details, this is something she is still processing. Some of it she told us, and some of it, most of it I guess, she didn’t tell us yet. This is, I think the details she will feel free to share, once all the hostages will come back.”
Romi’s release was part of the first phase of a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas.
“We didn’t talk much about the captivity. She is telling us you know, funny things form the captivity. She is sharing difficult things, but she’s sharing it in a kind of a humorous way. She was saying that us, the family, that she wanted to come back home to us, but the fact that she knew that we were fighting for her it was something that helped her go through the days.”
Alongside their joy at her return, Romi and her family are also focused on the remaining hostages left in the Gaza Strip.
“Our life is not complete until they (all hostages) will come back, this is something Romi is saying: ‘I cannot be happy, I cannot be fully happy, I cannot really gain my life back, because I know what they are going through’.”
