Abud learned from the recently released hostages that her teenage sweetheart has been chained, tortured, starved, burned, and hung by his feet – while suffering from an untreated bullet wound from the Oct. 7 terror attack.
By Rachel Avraham
This week marked the eight year anniversary of the young couple Eliya Cohen and Ziv Abud, the Jerusalem Post reported. For them, it should have been a joyous occasion, as the couple was engaged to get married and enjoyed many years together. However, instead of this week bringing joy, it brought about great sadness, for Eliya Cohen has been held hostage by the Hamas terror organization since October 7, 2023. Cohen is alive and is slated to be one of the hostages released in phase one, but has not been released yet. Eli Sharabi, Or Levy and Ohad Ben Ami provided crucial signs of life for some 10 men whose fate was previously unknown, among them Cohen, the New York Post noted.
Abud learned from the recently released hostages that her teenage sweetheart has been chained, tortured, starved, burned, and hung by his feet – while suffering from an untreated bullet wound from the Oct. 7 terror attack, the New York Post added. “I’m really, really tired from the fight, and I’m very sad because now I know the conditions that Eliya had—and still has—in the tunnels,” Abud told the Jerusalem Post. “It breaks my heart to know that he was chained, all that happened to him in the tunnels, from people that were with him in the tunnels.” According to the report, about a week before Eli Sharabi and Or Levy were released from captivity, they were together with Cohen, and Alon Ohel was also part of this group of hostages.
Abud, Cohen, and two others had attended the Nova Music Festival together. When Hamas attacked on October 7, they fled to a bomb shelter, which was renamed “the bunker of death,” as Hamas murdered many of those inside. Abud survived by hiding underneath dead bodies for six hours, while Cohen, Hersh Goldberg-Polin and Or Levy were abducted to Gaza. Seventeen Israelis were killed inside that bunker, the New York Post noted. On that horrific day, Cohen got wounded and recently released hostages have confirmed that he still has a bullet in his foot, which has remained untreated since October 7, the Jerusalem Post reported.
“We heard that he was tortured, that he didn’t get medical care, and that they were starving, that they get maybe one pita bread in the day,” Abud told the Jerusalem Post. “That he lost more than 20 kilos, that he was chained on his leg all the time in the tunnels from the seventh of October until now.” Even more heart-breaking, the recently released hostages told Abud that Cohen believes that she perished on October 7 and is no longer alive due to the news blackout in the Gazan tunnels, the New York Post noted.
“The moment that he was kidnapped, they put them on the truck, and then they shot inside the shelter,” Abud told the Jerusalem Post. “So if Eliya saw this situation, [it would be] crazy to know that someone survived this situation.” For Abud, this is especially heart-breaking. Abud, who met her fiancé when they were both 14 and beginning their romance five years later, said that since they began their relationship, they hadn’t been apart a single day – until October 7, the New York Post noted.
According to the report, this past August, to commemorate the Jewish version of Valentine’s Day, called Tu B’Av, Abud prepared a romantic dinner on the bustling Tel Aviv promenade, alone, complete with a bouquet of roses, his favorite meal and an evening gown, beside a cardboard picture of her fiancé, who is held hostage in Gaza. Passerby showed Abud compassion and support. This week, Abud marked Valentine’s Day and her eighth anniversary with Eliya alone once again, with great anticipation awaiting his release from Hamas captivity.
“It feels that people have forgotten about the hostages, but since President Trump was elected, it feels like a huge push. Trump does so much to bring the hostages home — I trust him to do the right things,” Abud told the New York Post. “I ask him to make sure Eliya and all the hostages come back home.”
Dr. Einat Yehene, the senior rehabilitation psychologist at the Hostages Families Forum, told the Jerusalem Post: “I think that the images we saw on Saturday, [the hostages’] slimness, drastic loss of weight, coupled with the lost look in the hostages’ eyes, coupled with the confrontation to the cruelty of inhuman conditions by Hamas, and also having the stories about the losses—two out of the three hostages lost their loved ones from their nuclear family, Or Levy and Eli Sharabi—I think these three elements together really made an impact and evoked all kinds of traumatic memories in our collective psyche from dark times in Jewish history.”
Last week, the three hostages that returned to Israel looked as if they had survived the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Indeed, MEMRI reported that even many Arab journalists have made a comparison with how Hamas has treated the Israeli hostages and the Holocaust. In a post on her X account, liberal Egyptian journalist Dalia Ziada shared a photo of the three Israeli hostages alongside a photo of Holocaust survivors in 1945, and wrote “never again!”
Amjad Taha, a commentator residing in the UAE, wrote in English: “Hamas treated hostages the same way the Nazis treated the Jews, starving them and keeping them in uniform, just as Hitler did to Holocaust survivors. Our hearts and prayers are with the families who have witnessed this in Israel. This inhumane act in Gaza in 2025 is beyond condemnation. May God bless you.”
According to the MEMRI report, journalist Safaa Subhi Al-Nu’aimi condemned the Red Cross, proclaiming: “The Red Cross has a lamentable history [of collaborating] with Nazism. It issued favorable reports about the condition of Jews in [Nazi] detention centers in the 1940s. It comes as no surprise that those who had ties with Hitler [now] have ties with Hamas.” In a series of messages on X, Sufian Al-Samarrai, editor of the Iraqi news website Baghdad Post, compared how Hamas treated the male Jewish hostages to the Holocaust and referred to Hamas as “ISIS-like gangs.” He also attacked Iran, Qatar and other countries that are propping up Hamas.
