Maya Regev lay badly wounded in a nondescript house in Gaza, her leg mangled from a gunshot, under orders not to make a sound.
The 21-year-old begged her captors to let her younger brother Itay, who was being held in a room nearby, join her while the bandages on her leg were replaced.
It was days after Hamas’s October 7 rampage triggered the war in Gaza, when terrorists burst across the border into Israel, killing some 1,200 people and seizing over 240 hostages — mostly civilians. The siblings were shot and wounded as they tried to flee an outdoor music festival-turned-killing field. They were thrown into a pickup and taken away with their friend, Omer Shem Tov.
“Itay and Omer walk in. And they began removing the bandages. And I’m screaming and Omer is holding my hand and covering my mouth,” a tearful Maya recalled during an interview with Channel 12’s Uvda investigative program.
Itay, 18, told how days earlier a “scared and sweaty doctor” painfully removed the bullet from his leg without anesthesia, while he was instructed to remain quiet or be killed.
Maya’s injury was more severe and she says she was eventually snuck into a Gaza hospital. Her dangling foot was re-attached in surgery, but sideways, at an unnatural angle. She gave her interview in a wheelchair, her leg in a cast.
משפחתה של מיה רגב פוגשת אותה אמש בבית החולים סורוקה. הם ידעו שהיא נפצעה במסיבה אבל במשך 50 יום לא היה להם מוצב מה מצבה. התיעוד מתפרסם באישור המשפחה. pic.twitter.com/RHSqHC1G79
— דפנה ליאל (@DaphnaLiel) November 26, 2023
The Regev siblings were among 105 civilian hostages freed in a week-long truce in late November. Shem Tov remains in captivity with 129 other hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 — not all of them alive. Some have been declared dead in absentia by Israeli authorities.
While being treated in the hospital, Maya said she was kept near another wounded hostage, Guy Iluz. The two spoke about returning home — what they would do, what they would eat. But Iluz died in the hospital.
“At first, I refused to believe. Before they took him away I said I have to see, like, that it’s really him. I have the duty to go speak to his family when this is over. I’m the only person who knew what really happened to him.”
Itay said that he and Omer in the meantime were taken to a different house, forced to dress as Muslim women so they would not be recognized as they walked in the dark of night.
Released Gaza hostage Itay Regev is embraced by his mother at Hatzerim airbase, early November 30, 2023. (IDF Spokesperson’s Unit)
From the hospital, Maya wrote her brother and Omer a note and asked it be delivered. She said she argued with her captors, demanding that she hear back.
Itay received it.
“They came one time with a note, a note from Maya, in which she wrote me where she is, what she is going through. She said she loves me, asked me to stay strong, for the family, for everyone,” he said.
He sent a response.
“They brought me a note that they (Itay and Omer) wrote me, and I knew it was really from them because I recognized the handwriting and my brother called me by my nickname,” Maya said.
Itay calls his sister Patcha.
“It was a light, a small light in all the darkness, that I heard from my little brother and from Omer, that I understood they were okay.”
They continued corresponding.
“Those notes gave so much strength, like in the small moment that I felt a bit like I was diving into bad thoughts, I just held Maya’s note, read it like 10 times, and it would give me strength,” Itay said.
The reunion of siblings Maya and Itay Regev, released from Gaza days apart, with a third sibling at Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba, November 30, 2023, in handout photos by the hospital. (Courtesy)
Since the brief ceasefire, Israel has pushed ahead with its campaign in Gaza, saying that military pressure is needed to free the remaining hostages.
Israel’s air and artillery bombardment has killed more than 21,800 people according to Hamas-run health authorities in Gaza, though these figures cannot be independently verified, and are believed to include both civilians and Hamas members killed in Gaza, including as a consequence of terror groups’ own rocket misfires. According to IDF assessments, some 8,500 terror operatives have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war.
Qatari and Egyptian mediators have been trying to broker a deal that would include a pause in the fighting and the release of more hostages.
Itay was separated from his friend, only to find out later he had been included in the list of hostages to be freed.
“If I had known I was going home, I can tell you that probably I wouldn’t agree to leave without Omer,” he said.
Their story is not over yet, he added. “Even though Maya and I are home, Omer is still there.”
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