Aviva Siegel’s whole face brightened.
“Of course, I have to,” she said when asked if she allows herself to dream about the day her husband is freed from captivity in Gaza.
“My heart will explode. I will scream. I will jump into the air, and it’s just going to be … I don’t know, I’ll dance. I’m sure that I’ll dance and scream,” Siegel, 63, told The Daily Signal.
Siegel has not seen her husband Keith in over a year; a separation made more difficult by the fact that she knows firsthand what he is going through.
When Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Siegel was taken hostage into Gaza with her husband, who is an American citizen. She was held for 51 days and kept underground in Hamas tunnels before being released in a hostage deal. She describes her days in Hamas captivity as “hell.”
“I touched death, and that’s one of the hardest things on earth,” Siegel said. “While we were lying there, I was trying to think, what is it going to feel like? Am I going to die before Keith? And I just prayed that I’d die first because I did not want to see Keith suffer.”
With little food and water provided for them in the underground tunnels where they spent their days laying on a dirty mattress or mat on the floor, Siegel lost 22 pounds. She watched as her husband, who is now 65, also grew weaker as the days passed.
Siegel recalled a moment in captivity when “Keith had to go to the bathroom and he tried to get up from the mattress, from the floor, and he fell. I’ll never forget that.”
During her captivity, Siegel says she, her husband, and the couple of young women who were hostages with them “weren’t allowed to talk. We weren’t allowed to whisper. Only sometimes they let us whisper.”
In the darkness underground, she says the worst moments of her captivity were “when they tortured Keith and they tortured the girls.”
“One of the girls, they beat up into pieces,” Siegel recalled. “They handcuffed her and they put a blanket over her and they beat her and beat her while I heard everything, and I wanted to scream. And when she came back, she sat on the floor next to me, she was shaking and crying like a baby. She was red all over, and I couldn’t cry and I couldn’t hug her because they didn’t let me.”
With pain and weariness in her eyes, Siegel said she wanted to protect the young women, one of whom is her daughter’s best friend, from being “tortured and tortured and kicked.”
“I tried to protect them, but I couldn’t,” she said.
“One of the times they took Keith,” Siegel recalled, “and they shaved him looking like an Arab, and he came out and he wanted to cry because he sat there like he’s not a human being.”
The reality of her husband still being held hostage was made harder in recent days with the passing of her mother-in-law, Keith Siegel’s mother. While she was still being held hostage, she recalls her husband telling her that the first thing he wanted to do when he was freed was hug his mother.
“It’s been a very difficult week for me,” Siegel said, “standing at the grave of his mom while he wasn’t there, while he is underneath the ground with terrorists.”
When she learned she would be freed, Siegel says she looked her husband in the eyes and said, “You be strong for me, and I’ll be strong for you.” Those words are what are keeping her going, she said, adding she is confident they are also giving her husband the strength to do “everything he can to stay alive.”
Since being released during a short ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas in November 2023, Siegel has not stopped advocating for her husband’s freedom and the freedom of all the hostages still held in Gaza.
“I can feel when I talk to people that they’re listening to me, but Keith is still there, and the girls that I was with … are still there,” she said.
Among the original more than 250 hostages taken into Gaza, an estimated 95 to 105 remain captive, and at least 60 of them are believed to still be alive.
Keith Siegel is one of three American citizens still being held captive and believed to be alive in Gaza.
Speaking at a press conference in Tel Aviv on Thursday following a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said he wants to close a ceasefire and hostage release deal this month.
“The prime minister indicated he wants to get it done,” Sullivan said of Netanyahu.
Israel has presented Hamas with a deal to release some of the hostages and begin a ceasefire, according to Axios. Now, Qatari and Egyptian mediators are working to negotiate a close to the agreement between Hamas and Israel.
Sullivan said negotiations have appeared more favorable since Israel agreed to a ceasefire in Lebanon, where the terrorist group Hezbollah, which had been attacking Israel from the north, operates.
Siegel told The Daily Signal that she and her husband “want good for the good people in Gaza,” adding that “Israel, and the whole region, and the whole world, should be a better place to live.”