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........

© The Times of Israel