Liri learned Arabic, studied her captors’ psychology, and knew when to speak and when to stay silent. She did not resist, did not rebel—she survived.By Hugh Fitzgerald, Frontpage MagazineShiri Albag is the mother of the recently-freed hostage Liri Albag. Her daughter suffered in captivity, but says that the “men had it [even] worse.”More on her long captivity, and her slow recuperation at home, and above all, her observations on those “innocent Gazan civilians,” can be found here:“‘The girls suffered, but men suffer more’: Shira Albag speaks about Liri’s time in captivity,” by Liam Dev and Maya Cohen, Jerusalem Post, February 13, 2025:After 477 days of uncertainty, endless prayers, and relentless struggle, Shira Albag wakes up from a dream—only this time, it is not a nightmare. She is finally waking up next to her daughter, Liri.“You know, waking up with your daughter after so long, feeling her presence—it’s overwhelming,” she says. “I keep telling myself, I’m in a dream.”Liri Albag, the IDF lookout soldier kidnapped from the Nahal Oz outpost on October 7, has not returned to the life she once knew. She is no longer the same girl who enlisted a year and a half ago.Despite the smiles and reunions with friends, something in her has changed.“Yes and no,” Shira says when asked if her daughter is starting to return to herself. “The moment I saw Liri and she shouted at us, ‘Liri Number 1’—our private joke at home—I thought, that’s my daughter. I was afraid of what I would get back, but it’s her. It’s my Liri.”Yet for every joyful moment, there are silent ones—the realization that the road ahead is long.“She’s grown up a lot,” Shira says, her voice heavy. “She understands so much, but she’s also very quiet at times. On one hand, she talks a lot, but on the other, it’s like everything is mixed together.”It turns out Liri did not just survive—she found a way to navigate through hell.“The moment she was taken, she realized her reality. She was now a hostage in Gaza, and she would learn to survive.”Survival was not a choice; it was instinct.“‘I’ll play their game, but I’ll outsmart them,’ she told me,” Shira recalls.Liri learned Arabic, studied her captors’ psychology, and knew when to speak and when to stay silent. She did not resist, did not rebel—she survived….And Liri Albag not only survived, but helped other Israelis to survive. Another hostage released earlier, Amit Soussana, described how Liri had saved her life, by convincing Soussana’s captors that she was not a soldier.Soldiers who were being held hostage received the cruelest treatment from Hamas; some — we don’t know how many — were executed.When Shira remembers the day her daughter was taken, anger fills her voice.“There’s so much anger about October 7,” she admits. “Not toward the soldiers who fought bravely, but toward the fact that no one was there who knew what to do. They sat there for hours—nearly four hours—watching their friends… some were still alive. If someone had come, they could have been saved.”There was a terrible failure of Israeli intelligence leading up to the October 7 attacks. Signals that had been picked up by Israeli intelligence, about a possible large-scale cross-border operation by Hamas, were unaccountably ignored by the leaders of the IDF.In fact, two IDF commando companies were diverted to Judea and Samaria from the Gaza border just days before the onslaught. There were IDF lookouts, like 19-year-old Liri Albag, but only a handful of soldiers to guard the kibbutzim, and only private security guards to protect the party-goers at the Nova music festival.They waited at the kibbutzim as 6,000 Hamas members, accompanied by hundreds of Gazan civilians eager to watch or even join in the fun, including the looting of Israeli homes, poured into Israel from Gaza for the IDF.But it took four hours before the IDF finally arrived, many hours too late. 1,200 Israelis had been subject to torture, rape, mutilation, before being murdered, and 251 Israelis had been taken back to Gaza as hostages where, like Liri Albag, they were subject to every sort of physical and mental torment.It wasn’t just Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad who held Israelis captive. It was also those people we call “innocent civilians” who held some of the hostages captive in their homes. “The so-called uninvolved civilians” — including even their “little children” — took part in holding Israelis captive.The most important message, repeated three times in this brief interview with Liri Albag’s mother, is that not just Hamas combatants, but all the people in Gaza, including children, are implicated in the holding of hostages.Some civilians kept the hostages, as domestic or sex slaves, in their homes. In Shira Albag’s estimation, there are no “innocent” Gazans; they all supported Hamas’ attack, and were delighted to learn of the atrocities inflicted by 6,000 Hamas operatives on October 7.These “innocent civilians” ran beside the motorcycles and flatbed trucks on which Israelis were carried back into Gaza, beating the terrified and often wounded men, women, and children.In every encounter with the hostages inside Gaza during the sixteen months of war, those “innocent civilians” exhibited the same cruelty as Hamas members.That is why Shiri Albag says that “unfortunately, there are two million terrorists in Gaza. Two million. Liri was in their homes, and the children — yes, even the children — are part of this. It’s not just those carrying rifles and wearing green headbands.The so-called uninvolved civilians are not uninvolved at all. And, unfortunately, we’re going to have to fight them all.”The post The mother of freed hostage Liri Albag on what her daughter endured appeared first on World Israel News.