The sisters of an Israeli woman kidnapped and killed by Hamas have described the “inhuman” conditions in which she was held captive, telling CNN they have been living “a nightmare” since her body was recovered by the Israeli military in an underground tunnel in Gaza.
Eden Yerushalmi was taken from the Nova music festival when Hamas launched its October 7 attack on Israel, and her body was among six recovered by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) late last month.
Her sisters Shani and May told CNN’s Anderson Cooper they had received proof that she was alive on three occasions, including just three weeks before her death.
“It’s very difficult for us. We feel like we’re in a nightmare,” Shani Yerushalmi said. “Sometimes it feels like it isn’t real, like it’s not happening to us, because the whole time we truly believed that Eden would come back home alive.”
Yerushalmi’s family have learned details of her captivity from the IDF since her body was returned to Israel from Gaza. Describing the tunnel in which she was kept for several weeks, Shani said: “They barely could stand fully … they couldn’t sleep next to each other, only in a line. There were no windows, no air, no light. Barely food, and if they needed to go to the bathroom they were forced to do it in a bucket.”
The IDF said the group’s bodies were found in a Hamas-run tunnel under the city of Rafah, and that they were “brutally” murdered “a short while” before troops were able to reach them. The IDF told the family her sister was “shot in the head from very close range,” and had marks on her hands from defending herself, May told CNN.
Yerushalmi’s death, along with five other Israeli captives, ignited fresh rage in the country, much of it directed at the handling of the crisis by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
More than 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage on October 7, according to Israeli authorities, and more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Israel’s ensuing war began. Netanyahu has been under intense pressure to reach a ceasefire-for-hostages deal that would secure the return of more than 100 people still held in the enclave.
“In that specific tunnel we know that they were a few weeks, which is horrible. I don’t know if I could be in there a day,” Shani told CNN.
Yerushalmi, along with Hersh Goldberg-Polin and Carmel Gat, was slated to be released as part of the “humanitarian category” based on a framework deal Israel and Hamas agreed to in early July, two Israeli officials told CNN after the recovery of their bodies, with one of them adding: “Our prime minister delayed it.”
The 23-year-old from Tel Aviv was a pilates instructor and working as a bartender at the Nova music festival on October 7. When sirens sounded, Yerushalmi sent a video of rocket fire to her family group chat, saying she was leaving the festival, according to the Hostages Families Forum.
For four hours, she spoke with her two sisters, May and Shani, who heard everything she went through as she tried to escape. Her last words were: “They’ve caught me.”
May, who chose to see Yerushalmi’s body after its return to Israel, told CNN: “We gave her a last hug to say goodbye to her. She was so thin, we could feel her bones sticking out.” Her autopsy later showed she was just 79 pounds when she died.
The sisters described Yerushalmi as a friendly and warm person, with May saying: “The most important thing is that she was a hero, and she survived 11 months in those tunnels.”
