Hostage Survivor Arbel Yehud Details Daily Abuse, Suicide Attempts in Hamas Captivity
"I tried to end it three times." Freed hostage Arbel Yehoud shares the devastating truth of her 482 days in captivity, the sexual abuse she endured, and her eventual journey to freedom.
Arbel Yehoud sat in front of the cameras on Friday night and said the words out loud for the first time.“I tried to end it three times,” she told Channel 12’s Ulpan Shishi. “I felt like I couldn’t go on. There were moments when I thought it was the only way out.”
For 482 days she had been held alone in the tunnels beneath Gaza.
Every single day, almost without exception, she was sexually abused.
Her captors broke two of her ribs.
They starved her until her body began to shut down.
She was 28 years old when they took her.
On the morning of October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists stormed her home in Kibbutz Nir Oz. They shot and killed the puppy she and her boyfriend Ariel Cunio had adopted only weeks earlier. They dragged Arbel and Ariel out together. Her brother Dolev was murdered trying to protect others in the kibbutz.
Within hours, the couple was separated. Arbel never saw Ariel again until long after her release.
She spent the next sixteen months in total isolation, underground. No other hostages. No daylight. No hope except the memory of the man she loved. “I survived because of Ariel,” she said. “Every time I thought about him, it gave me the strength to keep breathing.”
In the final months of her captivity, her guards began showing her drone footage of the protests back in Israel. She saw the posters with her face. She saw people calling her name. That was the moment she decided she would not let them win.
She was released on January 30, 2025, the last living female Israeli hostage to come home. She walked out alone, through a gauntlet of armed terrorists in Khan Younis, into the blinding sun.
Ariel was freed more than eight months later, after 738 days.
Arbel spoke now because she saw Romi Gonen describe her own sexual assaults in December. Until then, she had buried the worst of it. On Friday night she stopped burying it. This is what was done to her, for 482 days, simply because she was Israeli and Jewish.
There has been no response from Hamas. There never is.
The interview was broadcast in Israel on Friday and published in full by the Daily Mail today.