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In her first long-form interview more than two years after her release from captivity, freed hostage Rimon Buchshtab-Kirscht shared this week what she told her Hamas captor as she was handed off to Red Cross personnel in Gaza.
Buchshtab-Kirscht was 36 when she was abducted by the Hamas terror group during its October 7, 2023, onslaught, and then returned to Israel as part of a hostage-prisoner exchange and ceasefire deal that November. Footage showing Buchshtab-Kirscht visibly talking back to the terror operative went viral.
“The whole ride [to the Red Cross hand-off] he was teasing me about Yagev,” she told the Ynet news site, in an interview released on Sunday. She was referring to her husband Yagev Buchshtab, who was kidnapped alongside her from their home in Kibbutz Nirim and then killed in captivity.
“‘Yagev will be here in two days,’” she recalled the terrorist – named Mustafa – saying to her. “‘Yagev will be here four days from now.’ And when he started talking about Yagev, he was pressing all my buttons, and it didn’t sit well with me.”
She added, “And then the terrorists in the car gave me a speech about going out.” She recounted that they told her, in English: “Smile and wave.” She continued: “And when you go out to that audience, who are barking and raging and screaming at you, they start telling you, ‘Don’t be afraid.’”
“At that point, you’re already so hungry and exhausted that nothing moves you or frightens you, and I started cursing him in Arabic, so that everyone would understand. It wasn’t some super special confrontation.”
“I just spoke to him the way they deserve, like the sons of bitches they are,” she said.
“I shouted at him, ‘Just because you’re masked doesn’t mean I can’t see you, and just because your eyes are covered doesn’t mean I don’t recognize your voice, or remember what you did to me, and kul kalb biji yomo,” she said. The Arabic expression refers to every “dog” eventually getting what it deserves.
Married her lifelong friend in 2021
In the interview, the now-39 year old from Kibbutz Magen spoke about her lifelong friendship and then courtship with Yagev, whom she met when the two were in elementary school in the Gaza border area.
They became romantically involved in 2020, and married in 2021. They lived together in Nirim, not far from where they grew up, with five dogs and four cats.
She told Ynet that, in captivity, the couple spoke about their plans to have a child together, and recalled that when she quickly stopped getting her period as a result of severe weight loss, they chose to believe instead that she’d conceived before their abduction.
Buchshtab-Kirscht recalled how, at 6:29 a.m. on October 7, the moment the attack began, she and her husband were woken up by rocket sirens at the start of the Hamas invasion.
“The last thing he managed to do before [the terrorists] finally broke in was to look me in the eyes and say: ‘I’m sorry,’ and I immediately went into a speech: ‘Don’t you dare apologize, this isn’t your fault, everything is okay, the important thing is to stay together.’”
“At 8:40, they broke into the house, and they tried to separate us. Our shirts were torn, but we wouldn’t let go of each other, and they couldn’t manage to lift us up, so they dragged us on the sidewalk, and punched us.”
“They put us in a golf cart, where I was sitting on the dead body of a terrorist, and we drove past the kibbutz, and they told us, ‘Start walking.’ We walked a long time in the fields, in pajamas, barefoot.”
Eventually, a white Toyota pulled up, and they were pushed inside it, and given what she called “a tour of Gaza.”
“I covered Yagev’s eyes, so he wouldn’t see the bloodbath outside,” she said. “Among other things, I saw a girl on a motorcycle, tied up by the upper part of her naked body, as the lower part of it was being dragged on the ground.”
The couple was taken to a house in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis, the home of a Hamas operative named Osama, who she said was about 60 years old. He had two sons, one in middle school and one in high school, who brought her two kittens, and also gave her some acetaminophen for her injuries, she said. At one point, two other Hamas operatives came and pulled out one of her broken teeth.
“Sinwar spoke with me in English, said ‘Let’s talk'”
At one point, Buchshtab-Kirscht recalled, an “important person” from Hamas was taken to the area where she was being held with five other hostages. She later learned it had been terror chief Yahya Sinwar.
“At the time, I just knew it was a very senior person, who came with a notebook and wanted me to write down the details of the hostages in Hebrew block letters [rather than script], because that’s what he knew how to read, and also in English.”
“He said we’d all be recorded on video, saying our name, our age, where we’re from, and our ID numbers. Sinwar spoke with me in English, and he said I had a head on my shoulders, and ‘Let’s talk,’” she recalled.
“He wanted to know what our conditions were like, how [our captors] were interacting with us, and I said to him: ‘Great that you asked, I have a lot to tell you – but first, I want to ask something of you. Promise me that after I’m done, you will take Yagev and me down to the tunnels and put us with other hostages, because these [captors] treat us very cruelly.”
“And he took my hand and he really stood by it. Afterward, he took us down to the tunnels after we got a cup of hot tea, and Yagev got an inhaler,” she said, adding that she concealed the inhaler in her bra, which she also used to keep drawings given to her by child hostages.
In the tunnels, however, she said she and her husband were still treated poorly. They were kept in a cage and separated from other hostages.
Begging captors not to separate her from husband
When hostage releases began in late November, during a weeklong ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, the couple’s captors declared that Rimon would be released without Yagev.
Buchshtab-Kirscht told Ynet that she begged her captors to release a different hostage instead, pleading: ‘I don’t ask for much, not for medicine, not for toilet paper, I’m ready to stay here, with all the fleas, with my broken tooth and my broken face.’ But they insisted it had to be me.”
She said she was consoled by fellow captive Yarden Bibas, who had been separated on October 7 from his wife Shiri and two sons, 4-year-old Ariel and baby Kfir, all three of whom were later revealed to have been murdered in captivity. Yarden, and the bodies of his wife and children, were released in 2025.
When their guards allowed Bibas to speak with her, she recalled, “He said to me, ‘Rimon, if anyone knows what it’s like to be torn away from the one you love in this hell called Gaza, it’s me.”
In July 2024, Israel confirmed that Yagev Buchshtab had been slain in captivity. His body was later recovered by troops from Khan Younis alongside those of Avraham Munder, Nadav Popplewell, Alex Dancyg, Chaim Peri and Yoram Metzger — who were also kidnapped alive and slain in captivity — during a military operation in August 2024.
He was buried in Kibbutz Nirim on August 21, 2024.
‘Where the hell were you?’
When she was handed off for release, she said: “The Red Cross lady ran over to me, with a big smile, and I said to her: ‘Where the hell were you?! We waited for you on October 7, 8, 9.”
“Later, at a meeting in the President’s Residence, that same lady tries to talk to you about uninvolved civilians. And then you show her a scar, and explain that it’s from a four-year-old who threw a brick at you on your way out, because parents take their four-year-old children to throw things at hostages.”
Recalling her words to Meirav Tal, another hostage released together with her, Buchshtab-Kirscht said: “I told her, all the screaming and whistling is because we’re knockouts, gorgeous.”
She said she told Tal: “Keep your head up. We’re going to walk through this as two strong women, together.”
The post ‘I started cursing him in Arabic’: Ex-hostage reveals words to Hamas captor upon release appeared first on The Times of Israel.
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