Emily Damari: ‘I chose not to be a victim while I was held hostage’

“So, I’ve got one bullet in my hand, and one bullet in my leg. They took us outside. [Me and my best friend, Gali ] are sitting on the couch on the balcony, on my balcony, and while we're sitting there, I'm looking to my right, to my left, and seeing something like 60 or 70 terrorists outside doing whatever they want, very ecstatic from what they are doing.”

Abducting Emily with Gali Berman and his twin brother, Ziv, who are still held hostage, they took her firstly to one of the terrorists’ home, “where there is a family there. There was one of the guys, and his family, like six children, his wife, everything, and I saw another four hostages from my kibbutz.”

She said how she was taken to Al-Shifa hospital “- not the ‘civilian’ hospital that everyone talks about in the news. It was Al-Shifa and if terrorists took me to Al-Shifa, it means there weren’t civilians in there. As I got to the room, the first thing I saw was a dead body, blood on the floor, and the second thing was 10 or 15 terrorists inside the room, with their guns, and the third thing is that the doctor came to me and said: ‘Hi, I’m Dr Hamas.’

“This is Al-Shifa Hospital that the IDF continues to come back to, and all the news was talking about it, saying :’How could they go to these civilian places? To hospitals?’ So, this is the reason.’”

While in Gaza, Damari was moved around 30 times, living in “everything you can or cannot imagine – houses with families, hospitals, schools, tunnels of course.”

Having grown up hearing about the terrorist tunnels, Damari described it as “an insane moment” to be taken to one.

In the tunnel, she was kept in “a small, very stinky cage, without conditions to survive there”, alongside five other female hostages, “[being treated] like animals”.

The terrorists would call us ‘prisoners’, and I would say: ‘I’m not a prisoner. A prisoner gets to eat three times a day. A prisoner gets to sleep on a bed. A prisoner can call his parents, even if once a month

Asked by interviewer Emily Cohen, who was involved in the UK campaign to get Emily released, to describe her day-to-day life in captivity, Damari said it was “miserable”, but that she “didn’t choose to be a victim”.

Instead, she said she “took an active role. I used to educate the guards. They would call us ‘prisoners’, and I would say: ‘I’m not a prisoner. A prisoner gets to eat three times a day. A prisoner gets to sleep on a bed. A prisoner can call his parents, even if once a month. A prisoner gets to drink water and go to a loo and flush the chain. Above all, a prisoner did something wrong – they stole, they rape, they did something. I just woke up in my bed.’”

Believing that both her mother, Mandy, and brother had been murdered – “I even wrote [my brother’s] eulogy” – Damari was stunned when, on the rare occasion a terrorist turned on the TV, she saw her “amazing” mum holding her picture, campaigning for her release. “That was my best moment in my life in my worst place in my life. I found out she was alive, and she was fighting for me.”

Damari also revealed that, as well as seeing the demonstrations to release the hostages “and people fighting for us”, that she saw pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University. “I remember sitting there, looking at [the protesters] on Al-Jazeera. I’m gay, but I’m watching [the protesters] on TV and thinking: ‘He’s gay, she’s gay, he’s gay’, and I’m looking at the terrorist and I’m saying: ‘If they knew that they would come to Gaza and they wouldn’t come out, maybe they wouldn’t do it.’ And he’s looking at me smiling, as if to say: ‘You’re right.’”

Talking about her future, Damari said that until all the hostages were all released “’future’ is a difficult word for me. As long as my friends are still hostage in Gaza, I can’t really see my future.”

In the meantime, she said that having been deprived of basic needs for so long, she valued the small things in her life, “even drinking a cup of water, even saying ‘Hello’ and ‘Good morning’ to my mum and hugging my brothers. Everything has very, very big value.”

Asked what message she would like to give the UK Jewish community, Damari said: “The most important thing, as a community, as a Jewish community, is to stay united…Remember what our roots are, and remember if we don’t stay strong and if we don’t stay united, someone will come to us. So we need to keep strong, keep our heads up. And if people don’t have something nice to say, just keep it to yourself.”