(CNN) – The sisters of an Israeli woman kidnapped and murdered by Hamas have described the “inhumane” conditions in which she was held captive, telling CNN that they have lived through “a nightmare” since the Israeli army recovered her body in an underground tunnel in Gaza.
Eden Yerushalmi was kidnapped at the Nova music festival as Hamas launched its October 7 attack on Israel, and her body was one of six recovered by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) late last month.
Her sisters Shani and May told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that they had received proof that she was alive on three occasions, including one just three weeks before her death.
“It is very difficult for us. We feel like we are in a nightmare,” said Shani Yerushalmi. “Sometimes it feels like it’s not real, like it’s not happening to us, because the whole time we truly believed that Eden would come home alive.”
Yerushalmi’s family learned details of his captivity from the IDF since his body was returned to Israel from Gaza. Shani described the tunnel she stayed in for several weeks: “They could barely stand at all… they couldn’t sleep next to each other, just in a row. There were no windows, no air, no light. Barely any food, and if they needed to go to the bathroom they were forced to do so in a bucket.”
The IDF 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. The IDF told the family that her sister “was shot in the head from very close range” and that she had marks on her hands from defending herself, May told CNN.
Yerushalmi’s death, along with that of five other Israeli captives, unleashed new anger in the country, much of it directed against the management 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 died in Gaza since Israel’s ensuing war began. Netanyahu was under intense pressure to reach a hostage ceasefire agreement that would guarantee the return of the more than 100 people still held in the enclave.
“In that specific tunnel we know they were there for a few weeks, which is horrible. “I don’t know if I could be there one day,” Shani told CNN.
Yerushalmi, along with Hersh Goldberg-Polin and Carmel Gat, was on the list to be released as part of the “humanitarian category” based on a framework agreement that Israel and Hamas agreed to in early July, two Israeli officials told CNN after recovery of their bodies, and one of them added: “Our prime minister delayed it.”
The 23-year-old from Tel Aviv was a pilates instructor and worked as a waitress at the Nova music festival on October 7. When the sirens sounded, Yerushalmi sent a video of the rocket fire to her family group chat, saying she was leaving the festival, according to the Hostage Families Forum.
For four hours, he talked to his two sisters, May and Shani, who listened to everything that happened while he tried to escape. Her last words were: “They caught me.”
May, who decided to see Yerushalmi’s body after her return to Israel, told CNN: “We gave her one last hug to say goodbye to her. She was so thin that we could feel her bones sticking out.” Her autopsy later showed that she weighed only 35 kilos when she died.
The sisters described Yerushalmi as a kind and loving person: “The most important thing is that she was a hero and that she survived 11 months in those tunnels.”
