Almog Meir Jan, who was rescued from Gaza in Operation Arnon, spoke to journalist Ilana Dayan about his days in captivity and the way their captor, a "psycho" terrorist who was the cameraman for Al Jazeera, tortured him and his friends.
A video of Meir Jan had already been shown online on October 7, shortly after he was kidnapped from the Nova party, together with Elkana Bohbot, Bar Kuperstein, Evyatar David, and Guy Gilboa-Dalal, all of whom, except for Meir Jan, are still being held hostage in Gaza.
Meir Jan says that a short time later he was separated from the other hostages seen in the video. "They rolled me in a sheet and all I could think was, ‘they are going to throw me into a grave alive, or something. I was sure that this was the end. Who gets rolled in a sheet?" he asked.
"I also remember telling them in English, ‘Please don't kill me, and they laughed at me.’ They pushed me into some car trunk. Two of them sat on top of me, they were beating me, punching, kicking and someone hit me with his gun on my head."
For three days Meir Jan was blindfolded next to Shlomi Ziv and Andrey Kozlov, with whom he was held hostage, until they were rescued together. "For the first three days I didn't know what they looked like, because we were blindfolded."
After that, the terrorists decided to remove the blindfolds and move the handcuffs from our backs to our front and we were still handcuffed for two months.
Meir Jan also spoke about the terrorist who held them, Abdullah Al-Jamal, an Al Jazeera journalist and cameraman, whom they called Muhammad.
"The Muhammad who was with us, the main one, was an unstable person, psycho. We were scared to death of the days when he was angry, and even the smallest thing that happened was enough for him to punish us."
Meir Jan detailed the tortures they endured: "He would take a stick, tie us to the stick, or put a pen in our mouths and tie our mouths. We had to stand without talking or leaning on anything – sometimes for a day, sometimes two days, sometimes a week."
On the actual moment of the rescue, he said: "One of the soldiers stayed by my side. He took off his helmet and put it on me and I was so excited. I said, 'Yes, no problem. Let's get out of here!”
"We only felt safe when we were actually in the helicopter. As soon as I saw mother, we just hugged each other for three minutes. We were crying and crying."
When he was rescued, Meir Jan also found that his father had passed away on that day: "I had big plans for me and him."
"I was sure that we would be able to fix things. I said that from now on it is not going to be the same relationship that we had."