‘We’ll Make It Out of Here’: Released Hostage Describes Optimism and Bond with Other Captives that Kept Him Strong in Gaza

Almog Meir Jan describes how he and other captives supported each other while held in Gaza for 8 months.

By United with Israel

Rescued Israeli hostage Almog Meir Jan recounted how he and fellow captives supported each other while being held by Hamas in Gaza.

Meir Jan, 21, was held captive alongside Shlomi Ziv, 41, and Andrey Kozlov, 27, in Gaza for 8 months, before the three, along with Noa Argamani, 26, were freed in a daring Israeli military operation on June 8.

In an interview with Israeli Channel 12‘s Uvda program over the weekend, Meir Jan discussed ways he tried to stay sane while being held in Gaza, noting he had a morning routine of recounting his dreams from the previous night.

“Every night I remembered at least three dreams; it was part of my morning routine. I’d wake up and tell Shlomi what I dreamed overnight. For at least an hour, I’d tell him dreams,” Meir Jan said.

He said that every morning, he and the other captives would name 10 things they were thankful for, and that habit “really kept [him] sane.”

“At the beginning, it’s easy, ‘Okay, I’m glad I have a family, that I’m healthy.’ And then after 70 days, you find things, like, ‘I’m glad I have socks, I’m glad I have a nail clipper,’” he recalled.

Meir Jan also discussed his abduction from the Nova festival on October 7, saying the terrorists “stood on either side, and you walked through, and they hit you from here, from there.”

“From that moment, you’re some kind of a doll,” he said, noting that someone hit him with the butt of a gun, while terrorists bound his hands and feet and covered his eyes.

He said that he and the other captives would give monikers to their captors to distinguish between them. There was ““Tall Muhammad,” “Bald Muhammad,” and “Chubby cheeks Muhammad,” which referred to Abdallah Aljamal, an Arab journalist in whose house they were being held.

Meir Jan said Aljamal was the cruelest. “He’d be happy, then all of a sudden he’d yell. We were scared to death that it would be a day he was irritable, and the smallest thing that happened, he’d get an idea to punish us.”

“He’d take a stick, and tie us to the stick, and put a pen in your mouth, and bind your mouth, and we weren’t allowed to talk, weren’t allowed to lean on anything.” Meir Jan said this lasted “once for a day, once for two days, once for a week.”

“Usually we were allowed to speak,” Meir Jan said, but recalled an occasion when “[he] and Shlomi and Andrey were talking about something, and after an hour of talking, [Aljamal said] ‘What, why are you talking? I told you to be quiet! Yalla, go to your mattress, no bathroom, no nothing.’”

“He didn’t like any of us, but Andrey he was more degrading to,” Meir Jan said.

“‘I’m with you, brother,’” Meir Jan told Kozlov in encouragement. “Sometimes that’s what you need to hear there. You need someone to tell you, ‘You’re right, you’re okay, you’re not crazy, you’re not dirty, you’re not smelly, you’re okay — but you need to be smart.”

“It’s more important to be smart than to be right,” he said, noting those words “accompanied us throughout the entire period.”

At one point, though, he couldn’t contain himself and berated his captor, telling him, “You weren’t right, you killed kids.”

“A full week, we weren’t allowed to talk, to move from the bed, even to get up at all,” he said.

He said the guards would threaten to send him into the tunnels if he misbehaved.

“They always told us that the conditions there are terrible, that they don’t see the light of day,” he said, noting he was almost sent into the tunnels at a certain point.

But his “craziest story” from his captivity, he said, happened when Ramadan started.

“I took a piece of cardboard, and I started to make the squares of a calendar. I had 80 squares in the table. I hadn’t planned to make 80, but that’s what came out.

“On the square for the 80th day, I wrote, ‘I’m returning home.’ I would mark every day that passed, until I was on the last row of the table.”

“I said, ‘I don’t know how, but I believe we’ll get out of here before the 80th day.'”

“On the 76th day, we left Gaza.”

“I said, ‘G-d, don’t catch me on the details. A couple days more or less…80? 76 is also good.'”