For 505 days, Eliya Cohen was trapped in Gaza and certain that his longtime girlfriend, Ziv Abud, had been killed at the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, 2023. He was convinced he’d missed his chance to propose.
But Abud had survived by hiding for hours under dead bodies inside a bomb shelter. Later, when she discovered that Cohen had earlier purchased an engagement ring and planned to propose, she began referring to him as her fiance. All the while, she advocated for his release, not knowing if he was alive.
“We had all the reasons in the world to give up and commit suicide,” Cohen told a San Francisco audience about himself and his fellow hostages. “But instead we chose life.”
Cohen was released Feb. 22 but pledged to wait until the other hostages were freed before formally proposing. A week after the final 20 living hostages were released in mid-October, he asked Abud to marry him. Their wedding is set for August.
Reunited — and officially engaged — Cohen and Abud shared their stories with 175 people who gathered Sunday night at Congregation Chevra Thilim.
The Tel Aviv couple, both 28, started dating almost nine years ago. Attending music festivals, Abud said, was something that she and Cohen did regularly. They arrived at the Nova festival with Abud’s nephew, Amit Ben Avida, and his girlfriend, Karin Shwarcman, around two hours before the attack started.
Initially thinking Hamas was only firing missiles as they fled by car, the group decided to stop at a bomb shelter near a roadside bus stop to wait out the barrage. They crammed into the 10-person shelter with 23 others.
Terrorists surrounded the shelter and began throwing grenades inside. Aner Shapira, an off-duty IDF staff sergeant, caught and tossed out eight grenades. He was killed by the ninth grenade, along with 16 other people. This was the same shelter where East Bay native Hersh Goldberg-Polin hid and lost part of his left arm in a grenade explosion before being taken hostage.
The shelter, now known in Israel as the “bunker of death,” has since become a memorial site for the victims. On Google Maps, it was renamed the “bunker of Aner Shapira.”
Eliya tried to protect Abud from gunfire by piling bodies on top of her. Terrorists killed Ben Avida and Shwarcman, shot Cohen in the leg, forced him out of the shelter and loaded him onto a pickup truck, along with Goldberg-Polin, Or Levy and Alon Ohel.
“Just minutes before, we said goodbye to each other,” Cohen recalled. “Ziv just told me ‘OK, at least in the sky, we will be fine, and nobody would separate us.’”
As Cohen and the others were driven through Gaza, throngs of people surrounded the vehicle.
“Most of them wanted to hurt us,” he said. “They spit on us. They beat us. I remember one of them pulled my leg. He really fought with me.”
Cohen was smuggled into a family home, where he met a teenager who said a photo of him had gone viral on Gazan social media.
“‘Everyone around Gaza knows that you are here and want to kill you,’” the teen told Cohen. “And I said ‘OK, it’s good news for me.’ I knew that my family knew that I arrived to Gaza alive.”
Meanwhile, Abud was trapped in the bomb shelter for more than seven hours, buried under bodies and severed limbs. She was eventually rescued by a man tracking the location of his son, who died in the shelter.
The man transported Abud and six other survivors to a hospital, where she received thousands of messages from friends, family and well-wishers. Among them were screenshots of a video showing Cohen on the back of the Hamas truck in Gaza.
“This is the first moment that I realized Eliya was kidnapped,” Abud said. “And since then, for 505 days, I worked to bring him home.”
Abud began speaking publicly, desperate to spread awareness about Cohen.
“I saw [Ben Avida] murdered in front of my eyes, and I laid with his body for hours,” Abud told Sky News in January 2024. “It’s very hard for me to be here, but I’m doing the job because we want the support of the world, because we need it.”
For three weeks, Cohen, Levy and Ohel were deprived of food and water and were interrogated by their captors, who sought information about Israel’s military and intelligence leaders. Every night, Cohen slept next to a Hamas terrorist, with a gun between them.
The terrorists eventually moved Cohen into the network of tunnels underneath Gaza, where Cohen again encountered Goldberg-Polin before he and five other hostages were executed in August 2024.
During that time, Goldberg-Polin gifted Cohen a book in English he’d obtained called “Shadow and Bone,” and he repeated a famous Nietzsche quote that Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl used in his book “Man’s Search for Meaning”: “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how.’”
“My ‘why’ is my family who is waiting for me outside,” Cohen realized. “So I started to build a life routine.”
Every day for the remainder of his captivity, he acted out wrapping tefillin, prayed to God and wept. He pleaded with God to keep his family strong. At the same time, with the help of Levy, Ohel and Eli Sharabi, he learned English and began reading the book Goldberg-Polin gave him.
The conditions for the hostages only worsened over time.
“We could deal with everything. But nothing prepared us to deal with the starvation,” Cohen said.
Sharabi and Levy were released in early February and immediately informed Cohen’s family and Abud that Cohen was still alive. It was the first sign of Cohen’s life that anyone in Israel had received since Oct. 7, 2023.
Cohen described his reunion with his parents and Abud on Feb. 22 as the “best moment of my life.”
Their talk in San Francisco was organized by Malka Productions,a local Jewish event production company, and the Chosen Foundation, a Walnut Creek-based nonprofit founded shortly after Oct. 7 to educate people about Israel and Jews through public talks.
Sunday’s event was part of a nationwide tour the couple is making to share their story. Cohen has also written a memoir that was released in Hebrew in August. An English translation of “Mufawadat: 505 Days in Hamas Captivity,” which uses the Arabic word for “negotiation,” is forthcoming.
At the end of their talk, Cohen and Abud answered questions from the audience. One person asked if they ever plan to retreat to private life.
Cohen said he feels a responsibility to tell his story amid the increased antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment around the world. Even if he only changes the mind of one person about Israel or Jews, Cohen said, it would still be worth it for him and Abud.
“We are proud to be Jewish, and because of that, we are standing here,” Cohen said. “If I will do it for the rest of my life, I don’t know what will be tomorrow, but I know that in this moment, for me, it’s important. This is what I want to do.”