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.
“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.”
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.
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.”
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.”