Until October 6, 2023, Luis Har (Buenos Aires, 71 years old) was an anonymous citizen who divided his life in Israel between two kibbutzim near Gaza: Urim, where he settled after emigrating from Argentina in 1971, and Nir Itsjak, where his partner, Clara Marman, lived. That day, they were both enjoying the holiday with two brothers and Clara’s niece and decided to stay overnight. At dawn, a group of militiamen burst into the house by surprise, violently put them in a vehicle and took them to Gaza while a Hamas militiaman fired into the air and shouted “Allah is the greatest.” They became five (all with dual Argentine and Israeli nationality) of the more than 250 hostages that the Palestinian militias took that day.
Their captors took them for three hours through a dark tunnel (one of Har’s most memorable memories) and they ended up being held together in an apartment. Until November 28, when the three women (their niece Mia is the teenager with glasses whose photo became famous when she was seen walking out with her little dog in her arms) regained their freedom in exchange for the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and a week of ceasefire, the only one in eight months of war. Luis and his brother Fernando thought then that they would be next. So much so that the five of them said goodbye with the phrase: “See you in two or three days,” according to Clara Marman after their release.
It did not happen. On December 1, the truce expired, with no agreement to extend it. “When we started hearing the bombings at 07:00, [israelíes]Fernando and I looked at each other and said: ‘We’re not leaving here.’ We understood that the agreement was over and we were a little downcast. From that moment on, at the end of the day, we said: ‘One less day in prison.’ We knew it was one less. Not by how many, but it gave us hope.”
There were 76 more who were most afraid of hearing the Israeli planes. “We didn’t know where they were going or where they were going to shoot.” […] Sometimes you could hear the hum of the bombs passing nearby, I don’t know if above us, on our side. Glass broke in the windows several times. He fell 200 or 300 meters and felt it. He was shaking like an earthquake. The floor was all moving. First we felt the tremor and then the explosion. That really puts you under tension,” he recalls.
Har cooked for everyone, including her captors, when there was something to do. With an intact sense of humor, she remembers how on the first day the Islamist militants approached the oldest woman (Clara, 61 years old) with potatoes and told her to cook. She replied: “If you want to eat, Luis better cook.” That was when “there was everything” to prepare dishes. Then, with the Israeli obstacles to humanitarian aid that left areas of Gaza on the brink of famine, there were days when they barely received a pita bread to share.
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When the two men were left alone, they fantasized—half jokingly, half seriously—that an Israeli special forces commando would appear and rescue them. This is what happened on February 12, accompanied by powerful bombings that caused dozens of deaths. Har asked one of the soldiers to confirm that he “was not in a movie.”
He is, he clarifies, as he continues to feel today, turned into a celebrity whom everyone greets and smiles at in the Tel Aviv building where he receives this newspaper. It is the headquarters of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, the main lobby in favour of the negotiated return of the 129 hostages who remain in Gaza, at least a third of them dead. The issue now centres on Har’s life, despite being one of the only seven rescued by the army in eight months, and he poses with a T-shirt with the message: “Bring them back home” and the yellow ribbon that identifies the movement. He still cannot return to his home in Kibbutz Urim because they have not finished the so-called “safe room” in which to take refuge from the rockets from Gaza. Today, sporadic, but more than 3,000 in a few hours on October 7.
During his captivity, Luis Har did not feel that his captors hated him. “They accepted us as we are. There was no intention to kill us, but it was a strange situation for them and for us,” he describes. They never said it like that, but he felt, in fact, that they would have been happy to deliver them “on the second day.” But time passed, with no exchange, and a kind of implicit pact based on trust ended up being generated. “I’m here now also because they felt they didn’t have to fear us. That there was a certain trust that we were in the same thing together. They, for their part; us, for ours. They didn’t see their family either, they didn’t see anyone. They were there with us […] We try to show them trust. “That we were not going to escape, or make a challenge.”

They were never beaten. Sometimes they all ate together. But Har never wanted to forget the place each one occupied in the equation. “We knew that if they received the order to kill us, they would not hesitate. They would kill us on the spot,” he stresses. Nor were there “limits” on what to say or how. They avoided talking about politics. They dared to do so once, and it did not turn out very well.”[El dueño de la casa] He told us: ‘What are you doing here? You are Argentines. Go live in Argentina. This is Palestine.’ And there was no way to convince him otherwise. I tried to talk a little, but I saw that there was nothing to do.”
Luis distinguishes between “the owner of the house” where they were held captive – with whom he ended up developing a “kind of trust” – and the militiamen who passed by, “more aggressive” and always armed. With the former they came to “exchange thoughts, things” as best they could. “Hands, legs, eyes… Anything goes as long as you understand each other. I don’t understand Arabic. He didn’t understand much Hebrew. A few words here and there, in English. In the end we understood each other and with him we were able to reach a certain dialogue about different things.”
They even joked. “Once I told him, what’s going on here!? There is no flour, there is no meat… There is nothing. He looked at me like that, laughed and told Fernando: ‘just protest.’ I said, ‘You know what? I’m leaving’. Do you know what he did? He opened the door for me and did like this [imita con la mano una invitación a salir]. ‘No, no, I’m staying. Thank you…’ Going out on the street with everyone… That explains the situation a little. That after all, he knew how he was with us.”
The jokes were, however, accompanied by phrases of “psychological warfare.” For example, he would tell them: “Why would they go back to the kibbutz if in two or three years we will blow it up again?” Or he would ask them to lower their voices so that they would not be detected by the Israeli drones flying over Gaza and the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, would send in fighter-bombers to destroy the building, because he preferred them dead rather than redeemable. “Every time the army demolished a building” in Gaza, they were told that many Israeli hostages had died. Although they lacked access to mobile phones or news, they were aware that they were not the only ones and even proudly told them the real number: more than 250.
With the militiamen, he clarifies, “you had to take more care.” She never saw them smile and her only interaction was when one approached her after eating and said, in passing and quietly so that others would not hear: “Thank you for the food.”
Har insists twice that he was not afraid, which is not the word. It was “to take care of oneself, to survive.” And that the deprivation of freedom was causing them to feel down, and they supported each other depending on who of the five was the most whole. “You can only sit or lie down. You can’t make decisions or do anything. We didn’t have a piece of paper or a pencil. Nothing. And so the days went by…” As time dragged on, Luis – passionate about theater, folk dances and cooking – tried to kill time by telling stories. They also imagined trips (“we talked about going back to Bariloche, to the Iguazu Falls, to Ushuaia”…) or shared recipes for an uncertain future.
They did not know that tens of thousands of Israelis were demonstrating for their release. Nor that images of him decorated streets, squares, overpasses and even the country’s main airport. He had come to terms with the idea that he could leave Gaza lifeless and was at peace with it. He felt that, at age 71, he had lived long enough and his “signature,” as he called it, was on his four children and 10 grandchildren. “We do not think that [las autoridades] They forgot about us, but time passed and nothing happens […] We didn’t even know if we were important enough. That’s why it was a surprise that they took us out of there in the way they took us out.”
He insists that he doesn’t want to talk about politics, but in the end he can. He claims that the experience has changed his way of seeing the Middle East conflict. That he no longer believes there is “anyone to live with,” nor does he want to see his “Gazati friends who worked at the kibbutz” again. He returned one day to the other kibbutz, where he was kidnapped, and barely held on: “I couldn’t even get into the house. “It’s like I paralyzed myself.”
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