(NewsNation) — A Chicago-area mom abducted by Hamas during its Oct. 7 attack on Israel said her captors were greeted as heroes when she and her daughter arrived as hostages at a Gaza hospital.
“The minute we came in, all the nurses were standing there and going like this [cheering]. They were all so happy that they came back with prey, with Israeli-Jewish prey,” Judith Raanan told NewsNation’s Elizabeth Vargas in her first TV interview since the ordeal.
Raanan and her now 18-year-old daughter Natalie were the first hostages to be released by Hamas after the Oct. 7 attack.
At the hospital, Raanan said she interacted with a man she believed to be a “very high-ranked” Hamas leader who spoke “brilliant Hebrew.”
Just hours earlier on that Saturday morning, Raanan and her daughter had been sleeping in the Nahal Oz kibbutz near the Gaza border when they received a phone call warning them not to go outside.
“I started walking towards the room of my daughter, and that was also the moment that a rocket hit the bedroom where I was,” Raanan said.
It was the start of a massive Hamas ambush that ultimately left 1,200 people, mostly civilians, dead.
Realizing an attack was underway, Raanan explained to her daughter what was happening.
“I simply said, ‘Honey, do you remember how you’ve seen the movies? Those guys that have all this military artillery and stuff that come with guns and all? That’s what’s going to come through the door, so don’t panic.'”
Raanan recalls armed men bursting into the room while she and Natalie were still in their pajamas.
“My girl was afraid. She said, ‘Mom, I’m afraid to be raped.’ I said, ‘Nobody’s going to do nothing to you,'” Raanan said.
The attackers held the two at gunpoint and ordered them to convince neighbors to leave the safe rooms where they were hiding, Raanan said.
“He’s telling me, ‘You tell them to get out, you tell them to get out, or I’m going to bomb the whole building,'” she described.
Fearing the Israeli Air Force could arrive at any moment, the Hamas attackers rounded up the hostages they’d managed to capture and marched them, zip-tied and at gunpoint, through the desert to the Gaza border, Raanan said.
The 59-year-old mother from Evanston, Illinois, said she was badly cut when one of the men removed her restraint with a sharp knife.
“That’s when I said to God, ‘Do you want me to die like this?’ I knew that if the blood kept on going, I’m just dead,” she said, pointing at a scar on her hand. A piece of black tape and her pajamas eventually helped stanch the bleeding.
Once in Gaza, the hostages were taken by a group of men in a car to the hospital. All the while, Raanan said she worried for her family.
“I thought of my mother. Is she OK? Is she dead? Is she alive?” she said. “You had no way of knowing.”
After two weeks in captivity, Raanan and her daughter — who have dual American-Israeli citizenship — were released in a Hamas deal with the Qatari government. Hamas abducted roughly 200 people during the rampage on Oct. 7. An estimated 100 others are still being held captive.
“We have hostages that are going through mental, physical, emotional hardship and need to be released,” Raanan said.
Last week, a United Nations envoy said there are “reasonable grounds” to believe Hamas committed rape, “sexualized torture,” and other cruel and inhumane treatment of women during its surprise attack. The report said there are also “reasonable grounds to believe that such violence may be ongoing” based on firsthand accounts of released hostages.