This account is based on more than a dozen interviews with former and current Israeli military officials, family members of hostages and Palestinian eyewitnesses.
It was a busy weekend morning in the market at the Nuseirat refugee camp, Osama Abu Asi recalled. Fighting could be heard in the distance, but it didn’t keep away the shoppers, who perused the few bags of flour and sugar he had spread on his blanket.
A secret mission
Abu Asi said he did not know that nearby, in an apartment one floor above the street, sat a young, dark-haired woman known around the world — last seen in a viral video clip being driven into Gaza on the back of motorcycle on Oct. 7, screaming, “Don’t kill me!”
She was Noa Argamani, one of about 250 Israeli hostages taken captive by Hamas.
Her 245th day in captivity had started like most others until, shortly after 11 a.m., she heard a knock at the door, followed by yelling. Suddenly, the room was filled with Israeli soldiers. “You are being rescued!” they shouted in Hebrew.
‘We have the diamond’
“They simply came, just like that,” Argamani, 26, would tell her close friend Yan Gorjaltsan hours later.
The rescue operation on Saturday that freed four Israeli hostages and killed more than 270 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials, was one of the most dramatic and deadly episodes of Israel’s war against Hamas. This account is based on more than a dozen interviews with former and current Israeli military officials, family members of hostages, and Palestinian eyewitnesses, as well as analysis of verified video footage.
‘A wall of fire’
He commandeered the tuk-tuk he used for moving his merchandise and ferried some two dozen dead and injured people to al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, where he said bodies covered the floor.
“They were shooting and targeting everything,” paramedic Abdel Hamid Ghorab said from nearby al-Awda Hospital, which struggled to treat the rush of wounded. “None of us could even tell what happened outside.”
