UNITED NATIONS — Three years after the worst massacre in Israel’s history, Eliya Cohen — who survived 505 days in Hamas captivity — took the stage at the United Nations alongside his newlywed wife, Ziv Abud, a survivor of the Nova music festival massacre, and tried to explain to some of the world’s top diplomats what he had endured.
“They didn’t let me change clothes or to get a shower, even to eat or to drink,” he said. “They chained me with heavy iron chains by my leg,” Cohen said during an emotional discussion moderated by Dr. Phil McGraw at Israel’s U.N. commemoration Tuesday.
He said lights were kept on to prevent the hostages from sleeping and that captors would enter repeatedly during the night screaming in an effort to frighten them. Cohen said they were not permitted to use a restroom and that at times survival felt almost impossible.
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But he described repeatedly forcing his mind away from the violence and toward the possibility of returning home.
“Don’t think about the violence. Don’t think about the torture. Don’t think about everything,” Cohen recalled telling himself. “Just continue, stay strong. And maybe one day, you will come back home to your family.”
Cohen was among the 251 people abducted during the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack, when about 1,200 people were killed in southern Israel in their homes and at the Nova Music festival. It was the deadliest single day in Israel’s history. He personally lost 48 people he knew that day.
His wife, Ziv, carried a different piece of the same story.
Abud and Cohen had arrived at the Nova festival shortly before dawn with her 19-year-old nephew Amit and his girlfriend Karin. When the attack began, they eventually took refuge in a roadside bomb shelter that Cohen said was designed for roughly eight people but became packed with 29.
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Abud told the audience that more than 40 terrorists later attacked the shelter with grenades and gunfire. One man inside repeatedly grabbed grenades and threw them back outside before he was killed, she said.
As the attack continued, Cohen covered Abud with bodies — an act that saved her life.
“I lost my consciousness. Eliya was kidnapped,” Abud said. “And after seven hours, I woke up in the shelter. I found myself in a pile of bodies.”
She paused, fighting back the tears. “It wasn’t even bodies. It was body parts.”
Abud said she then saw that Amit and Karin had been killed. “I needed to sit with the bodies for seven more hours,” she said. She was eventually rescued, one of seven survivors from the shelter.
“We were four people that went to the festival from the same house,” Abud said, “And I’m the only one that came back home that night.”
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For 505 days, she campaigned for Cohen’s return without knowing whether the man she loved would ever come home. Cohen, meanwhile, said he believed while in captivity that Abud had been killed.
The couple married weeks before Tuesday’s ceremony.
“But now he’s here,” Abud said. “And I can look forward to the future after we got married.”
She said she hoped the years ahead would include “kids and family because we are here and we survived. And we need to live a normal life,” she said.
Another Oct. 7 survivor who addressed the diplomats was Oriya Berlin, a young Israeli visual intelligence observer who had arrived at a base in the Gaza border area just two days before the attack.
Berlin said she woke on the morning of Oct. 7 believing she was hearing a thunderstorm.
“Outside, thousands of missiles were raining down with a single objective: to destroy my life and the lives of my friends,” she said.
Berlin and four other soldiers ran barefoot and in pajamas into a small shelter. They were unarmed. She said the women initially believed the incursion would resemble scenarios they had studied during training — a small squad that Israeli forces could quickly contain.
Seconds later, she said, they heard vehicles and gunfire. Berlin described roughly 60 heavily armed terrorists attacking the base. At one point, she said, a message appeared in the unit’s WhatsApp group telling soldiers to shout “IDF” in Hebrew so Israeli troops could find them. The broken Hebrew immediately raised suspicions that a terrorist had taken a soldier’s phone.
They remained silent.
Berlin said they then heard another group shouting for soldiers to identify themselves, followed by a burst of gunfire and silence.
Ten hours after the attack began, she said, special forces finally reached them.
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Berlin said that after learning how many of her friends had been murdered or kidnapped, she could not remain at home. Although she was offered the opportunity to leave military service, Berlin said she refused and returned as an observer for another six months before later moving into the IDF Public Diplomacy Office.
“I wanted the world to see that the IDF is not just an intimidating military force on a television screen,” she said. “It was also a 5’2″ fake blonde girl like me who simply wanted to protect her home, her family, and her friends.”
She said she has since spoken before audiences ranging from international organizations to high school students who told her “I was wasting their time because of their deep-seated anti-Israel hostility.” “But I stayed,” Berlin said. “I spoke because the truth demands a voice.”
Berlin said her decision to continue speaking was rooted in the friends who did not survive.
Before the ceremony, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz met privately with Cohen and Abud, asking Cohen how he was feeling physically and telling the couple how good it was to see them “healthy and alive.”
Minutes later, from the stage, Waltz became visibly emotional as he recounted a part of Cohen’s captivity that he said he had been unable to get out of his mind.
Waltz said that on the night before Cohen’s release, Hamas tried to make him record a propaganda video claiming he had been treated well. “He refused,” Waltz said. “He held firm. He said no.”
Waltz said Hamas again tried to turn Cohen’s release into propaganda the following day, placing him before cameras and instructing him to raise his hands.
“He refused again,” Waltz said. “Eliya, we salute you. I salute you,” Waltz continued. “You are a proud, strong Jew. You’re undefeated, man” he said with his voice breaking.
The hostage crisis stretched over two years and several rounds of negotiations, releases and rescue operations. Waltz told Fox News Digital after Tuesday’s ceremony that he wanted the commemoration to acknowledge both the loss of Oct. 7 and how much had changed since.
“Oct. 7, 2023, was their 9/11, was their Pearl Harbor,” Waltz said. “More Jews were brutally massacred that day than any day since the Holocaust.”
He said it was important “to recognize the loss” and “hear directly from the survivors,” but also to take stock of the region three years later.
“We have President Trump’s 20-point peace plan. We have a U.N. resolution establishing the International Stabilization Force,” Waltz told Fox News Digital. “He’s determined to not repeat what’s happened so often in the past, where Hamas rebuilds, Iran rearms, they attack again, and you have this devastation all over again.”
Waltz pointed to broader shifts across the Middle East.
“Iran is on its back foot. Lebanon has hope, Syria has hope. Iraq has hope,” he said.
He said he hoped the commemoration could combine “remembrance, the perspective, and I think charting, trying to chart a path of hope and peace for the future.”
From the stage, Waltz argued that Oct. 7 had produced the opposite strategic result from what Iran and its allies sought. “Oct. 7 completely, and I think irreversibly, has backfired on Iran and all of their terrorist proxies,” he said, pointing to changes in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq and the expansion of Israel’s regional relationships.
He ended with a message to the audience: “America will stand with the Jewish people.”
“Be strong. Be resilient. Be wise,” Waltz said. “And know that what you’re doing is right. Stand with your moral compass and know that this administration, the United States of America, stands with you.”
Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Danny Danon used the gathering — attended by ambassadors and diplomats from multiple countries — to turn his attention to the institution hosting it.
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“Even in this building, the U.N. is trying to demonize and isolate Israel,” Danon said. “They have turned the victim into the accused, comparing our IDF soldiers to Hamas terrorists.”
Danon said he has been told by colleagues that he takes criticism of Israel at the U.N. ‘too personally’.
“Indeed, it is personal,” he responded. “My daughter is serving right now in the IDF. My son served as an officer in the IDF,” Danon said. “He was supposed to be on the Re’im base next to Gaza on Oct. 7. The last minute, he was released home for the holiday.”
“That’s why it’s personal,” Danon said. “The U.N. tries to demonize all of our sons and daughters, our lions and lionesses who give everything so we can freely live in our homeland. So yes, it is personal. It’s personal for all of us.”
For Cohen and Abud, however, the event eventually returned from geopolitics to something much smaller: the possibility of an ordinary future.
Abud said they hoped to have children and build a family despite knowing that Oct. 7 and the 505 days that followed would remain part of their lives.
Cohen, asked by McGraw what he would say if the terrorists who abducted and tortured him were watching, needed only a few words.
“I won,” Cohen said.
“I won and I’m here.”
He then turned his message outward.
“Stay proud to be Jewish,” Cohen said. “And stay proud to be Israeli.”
“We are here to stay.”
