Noa Argamani, freed Israeli hostage, reunites with her father

The four captives rescued on Saturday by Israeli forces from Gaza include Noa Argamani, a 25-year-old woman who was kidnapped by Hamas from the Nova Music festival on October 7, 2023.

After spending 8 months in the custody of the militants, she was safely reunited with her father today after the Israel Defence Force (IDF) struck a “terrorist infrastructure” in central Gaza.

Israel released images of a smiling Argamani meeting and hugging her father, Yakov Argamani. The forces said she had spoken to the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog over the phone.

Argamani was captured in multiple videos of the Hamas attack, and one of the widely shared videos showed two Hamas men taking her on a bike while she pleaded for help. Her boyfriend was also taken away by the militants.

She could be heard crying, “Don’t Kill me!” in the video.

In January of this year, Hamas released a video of Argamani, along with two other hostages, in which she could be heard speaking about hostages being killed in the Israeli airstrikes.

Noa’s mother, Liora Argamani, has stage 4 brain cancer, and she has repeatedly expressed her desire to see her daughter again. In one of the video messages, with a family photo including Noa in the background, the mother could be seen pleading to release her daughter.

“I want to see her one more time. Talk to her one more time. I don’t have a lot of time left in this world,” Liora said in the video.

The other three hostages rescued are Almog Meir Jan, a 21-year-old man from Tel Aviv; Andrey Kozlov, 27, who was working as a security guard at the festival, and Shlomi Ziv, a 40-year-old farmer from northern Israel.

The Hamas raid on October 7 killed some 1,200 people in Israel and took around 250 hostages. Israel declared war against Hamas following this action, and subsequent offensives in Gaza have killed at least 36,801 Palestinians. It is believed that at least 116 hostages are now left under Hamas’s custody in Gaza.