Two sisters tell CNN about Hamas holding Israeli hostage, who was killed in ‘inhumane’ conditions under Gaza

CNN
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The sisters of an Israeli woman kidnapped and killed by Hamas have described the “inhumane” conditions in which she was held, telling CNN they have been living a “nightmare” since the Israeli military found her body in an underground tunnel in Gaza.

Eden Yerushalmi was kidnapped from the Nova music festival when Hamas launched its attack on Israel on October 7, and her body was among six found by the IDF late last month.

Her sisters, Shani and Mae, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that they received proof that she was alive on three occasions, including just three weeks before her death.

“It’s very hard for us. It feels like we’re in a nightmare,” Shani Yerushalmi said. “Sometimes it feels like it’s not real, like it didn’t happen to us, because all the time we really believed that Eden would come home alive.”

The Yerushalmi family has learned the details of her captivity from the IDF since her body was returned to Israel from Gaza. Describing the tunnel where she was held for several weeks, Shani said: “They could barely stand up straight… They couldn’t sleep side by side, only in a row. There were no windows, no air, no light. There was hardly any food, and if they needed to go to the bathroom, they had to do it in a bucket.”

The Israel Defense Forces said the group’s bodies were found in a Hamas-run tunnel under the city of Rafah, and that they were “brutally” killed “shortly” before troops could reach them. May told CNN that the IDF told the family that her sister was “shot in the head at very close range” and had marks on her hands from self-defense.

The killing of Yerushalmi, along with five other Israeli prisoners, has sparked a new wave of anger in the country, much of it directed at the way Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has handled the crisis.

According to Israeli authorities, more than 1,200 people were killed and 250 others were kidnapped on October 7, and more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the start of the Israeli war. Netanyahu is under intense pressure to reach a ceasefire in exchange for the release of the hostages that would guarantee the return of more than 100 people still being held in the Strip.

“In this particular tunnel we know they were there for several weeks, which is horrific. I don’t know if I could have stayed there one day,” Shani told CNN.

Yerushalmi, along with Hersh Goldberg Polin and Carmel Gat, were scheduled to be released as part of a “humanitarian category” under a framework agreement agreed to by Israel and Hamas in early July, two Israeli officials told CNN after their bodies were recovered. “Our prime minister delayed it,” one of them said.

The 23-year-old from Tel Aviv was a Pilates instructor and waitress at the Nova music festival on Oct. 7. When the sirens went off, Yerushalmi sent a video of the rockets being fired to her family group chat, saying she was leaving the festival, according to the Hostage Families Forum.

For four hours, she spoke with her sisters, May and Shani, who heard everything she went through as she tried to escape. Her last words were: “They caught me.”

“We hugged her one last time to say goodbye. She was so thin, you could feel her bones sticking out,” May, who chose to see Yerushalmi’s body after it returned to Israel, told CNN. An autopsy later found she weighed just 30 kilograms (66 pounds) when she died.

The sisters described Yerushalmi as a warm, friendly person, and May said: “The most important thing is that she was a hero, and she survived 11 months in those tunnels.”