Hostage rescued alive from tunnel in the Gaza Strip

52-year-old Kaid Farhan Elkadi is the eighth hostage to have been rescued alive since the war between Israel and Hamas began last autumn.

According to the AP news agency, he is the first prisoner to be rescued alive from the network of tunnels that Hamas has built in the Gaza Strip.

After the rescue operation, Elkadi was reunited with his family in an Israeli hospital. He also got to speak to the country’s president, Isaac Herzog, on the phone.

– Suddenly I heard someone speaking Hebrew outside the door. I couldn’t believe it, Elkadi said in the phone call.

Lived underground

Elkadi, who is Arab-Israeli Bedouin, comes from a village south of the city of Rahat. He has two wives and a total of eleven children. When Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups attacked Israel on October 7 last year, he was at work as a security guard in Kibbutz Magen.

Here he was captured and taken to the Gaza Strip. When he was rescued, he had not seen the sun for almost eight months, according to Israeli media.

The Israeli military says that Elkadi was found alone in a tunnel in the south of the Gaza Strip and that the rescue operation was complex.

Many are still being held captive

Hamas and other armed groups abducted around 250 people from Israel on 7 October last year. Of these, around 70 are said to still be alive in the Gaza Strip.

About 1,140 people were killed in the attack on southern Israel, and the majority of them were civilians.

Since then, over 40,400 people have been killed in Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, according to Palestinian health authorities. A large part of them will be children and other civilians. Large parts of the building mass in the Gaza Strip have been left in ruins, and over 90,000 people are said to have been injured.