The nurse taken by Hamas who believes caring for fellow hostages helped save her life
Nili Margalit endured abuse by her captors while ensuring the wellbeing of elderly prisoners
WITH a dozen filthy mattresses crammed into the tiny room, there was barely enough space to walk to the lavatory.
A dark and narrow passageway – 72 steps from end to end – sat behind the only door that separated the hostages from the rest of the sprawling, subterranean network of tunnels where they were being held underneath Gaza.
As a nurse, Nili Margalit knew the elderly Israelis and Thai workers she was imprisoned with would have to exercise if their bodies were to survive captivity. So she got everyone on a daily exercise routine.
“I insisted that each one of us will have a few moments every day to get up and to walk. Because it’s very important to maintain movement... the density of the bones,” she told The Telegraph.
Ms Margalit had quickly assumed a senior role among the prisoners.
When they were thrown into the improvised, underground cell, a Hamas member insisted that they produce a list of medicines needed by the hostages to treat any chronic conditions.
Given the scarcity of medicines supplied to her, Ms Margalit was often forced to create cocktails of drugs to keep her new patients’ blood pressure under control.
Able to speak a little Arabic, the 41-year-old helped compile the list of drugs, as well as other supplies she needed to treat the various wounds people had suffered when they were snatched from southern Israel during the Oct 7 terror attack.
On the morning of Oct 7, as news of Hamas’s raid broke, Ms Margalit told her friends she was sheltering in the safe room of her home in the Kibbutz Nir Oz, less than a mile from the Gazan border fence.
By 9.12am, her friends had lost communication with her.
Teenage terrorists had arrived at her home and started looting when they discovered she was hiding inside. They smashed through the door, dragging Ms Margalit, who was barefoot and only wearing pyjamas, onto the street.
The nurse was convinced she was about to be executed in cold blood.
However, she was loaded on to a golf cart and driven towards Gaza in a crowd of hundreds fleeing back across the fenced frontier.
She was taken by her kidnappers, who she now believes were opportunist civilians, to Khan Yunis, the enclave’s largest city. There she was bundled into a warehouse that had access to Hamas’s tunnel network and sold into captivity.
Before she was taken underground, one memory sticks out. “I immediately recognised my father’s red truck, he had a red four-wheeler,” Ms Margalit said. “And even then, I didn’t understand what my father’s red truck was doing there.”
From there, she was taken into the tunnels. The holding cell was dark and barely had enough oxygen to breathe. The men arrived with blackened eyes after they were beaten during the kidnappings. Elderly hostages had their glasses and hearing aids removed.
A bucket was placed in one corner for the men and women to go to the lavatory. In another corner was an open barrel to clean themselves and their clothes – the same they were wearing when they were kidnapped – and one spare T-shirt.
“But there was nothing to wash with... no soaps,” Ms Margalit said.
Ms Margalit believes her assumed role as the prison cell’s nurse helped keep her safe from the threats of violence by the four terrorists charged with guarding the captives. She said: “As a nurse, the fact I treated them, they never once saw a doctor, so relied on me to take care of them. That was my job. So in some way, they tried to keep me safe and sound, so I didn’t suffer from any kind of physical violence.” But this didn’t stop the psychological abuse.
“There was a lot of mental and emotional abuse,” she continued. “I always told them ‘my father is dead, my father is dead’, and one time this broke me – it was really hard for me.
“So what they did was whisper around and then told me, ‘Oh no, he’s not dead, see he’s on the list. Don’t be worried, we need you, trust in us, your father is alive, we will take care of him’.”
Ms Margalit was left contemplating her father’s fate for 54 days, until she was eventually released on Nov 30.
She was the last of the women to be plucked from the holding cell, taken to a car on the surface.
The day after her release, Israel confirmed the death of her father Eliyahu Margalit, whose body remains in Gaza.