Hostage survivor and grieving mother share their trauma on the anniversary of October 7
ITV News Correspondent Rachel Younger spoke to Ayala Puder and Moran Stella Yanai about how October 7 changed their lives forever
The sirens are sounding across Tel Aviv in the moments before I meet Moran Stella Yanai.
It’s a reminder that although her ordeal is over, the Israel-Gaza conflict is fiercer than ever.
In fact, over the past few weeks it has extended to multiple fronts. Israeli forces are now on the ground in Lebanon, they are bombing the Houthis in Yemen and in the hours after we met, Iran fired almost 200 missiles at Israel.
In the midst of all this, Moran exudes calm.
She is 40, but you wouldn’t know it; her friendship bracelets spelling out “hope” and yellow ribbon earrings are the only clue to what’s she’s endured.
Moran was a hostage in Gaza for an unimaginable 54 days. I ask her to take me back to the events of October 7 and she exhales slowly.
“It’s completely insane that we are using the term a year ago," she said.
“At 06:29, everything shut down. If I have to go back, I use the word 'nightmare', a horror movie. I always say that it doesn’t seem real."
Moran was selling jewellery at the open air Nova Music Festival, not far from the border in Gaza, when the worst attack Israel has ever experienced began.
Before we meet, I watch the video - taken by Hamas militants and shared by them on social media - of Moran trying desperately to hide in a small hole in the ground.
The look in her eyes is haunting as she realises the gunmen have found her and there is nowhere to go.
“It was completely quiet,” she told me.
“Then we hear 'cuckoo', and there is a bunch of terrorists standing on top of the mound screaming 'Allahu Akbar', laughing and running towards us.”
By then Moran already had a broken ankle from falling over earlier as she ran. But she refused to panic.
She believes that had she been younger she would have tried to fight back. Instead, she tells me, she gathered every bit of experience she had and began to quietly have a conversation with “the man upstairs”. “All I have in my mind is to not resist” she explains. “That’s what I did. I released my muscles, I released my mind and I gave in to the situation because I had no way to protect myself. I was beaten all through the way to Gaza”. By the time Hamas drive her over the border, to the sound of cheering crowds, she is focused only on surviving.
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Soon, Israel’s bombs begin to fall on the area where Moran is held, shattering the window next to where she is sleeping. It is a daily battle to hold it together.
“You’re in Gaza, you understand? I had scars all over my body,” she told me.
“I didn’t feel the pain. Your mind protects you at all costs because you understand you got hit.
"But now I need to deal with the fact maybe they will rape me, maybe they will kill me, maybe they’re planning to torment me. I don’t know what they are planning to do with us… so I need to put my focus there.”
With no television or radio, Moran has no idea of how the war is going, nor how extensive Israel’s destruction of Gaza is.
She describes how on three different occasions her captors try to fool her into believing she’s about to be released, marching her down onto the street alongside two other hostages.
But finally, in late November, the longed-for moment comes.
“I didn’t believe them,” shrugged Moran.
“I really believed that on the last day when he came to take me out of the house they were going to kill me because he covered my eyes and that had never happened before. But eventually we crossed the border”.
Videos of that moment show her smiling in the back of a jeep. It’s a small, knowing smile that Moran wants to emphasise wasn’t for her captors, but for herself.
Because in that moment, she knew her strength had prevailed, that Hamas hadn’t broken her.
“I won,” she nodded. “I won."
It was only when she saw her family that she allowed herself to scream. At last, after weeks of being hit whenever she cried, Moran could let her tears flow.
It took a week for her to learn to walk properly again. After so long being thirsty, it was much longer before she was ready to let a tap run for more than a few seconds.
But after a year of unimaginable horror, in Gaza more than anywhere, Moran is determined to remain hopeful for the 97 hostages who remain unaccounted for.
She no longer has a fixed address, and has spent the past ten months travelling the globe to keep their names in the headlines.
“I have to think of them as being strong and I have to believe they have the same power as me inside to survive” she said firmly.
“I have to believe they will have the same miracle I had. I have to believe they will make it back home.”
When Ayala’s eldest daughter, Maya Puder, got her first tattoo, her mum was not impressed.
But the 25-year-old film student from Tel Aviv, already an aspiring actor and director, knew exactly what she wanted.
She chose the words “Better than Before” because that was what she stood for - trying to make the world better, just by a little, every day.
But Maya had far too few days ahead of her, because she was murdered by Hamas gunmen at the Nova Music Festival in southern Israel, just after 8am in the morning on October 7.
Sitting in the same field where Maya danced through the early hours with her friends, Ayala smiles wryly as she pushes back her sleeve.
Her aversion to tattoos is a memory now. She shows me the same words, “Better than Before”, inked in the last six months onto her skin.
“It was her responsibility” she tells me. “Now it is mine”.
Along with her irrepressible sense of fun, all of the tributes to Maya mention her warmth and forthrightness.
Meeting Ayala, who tells me she misses the arguments almost as much as the hugs, it’s easy to see where that came from.
Ayala is determined to talk about what happened to Maya and 410 other festival-goers like her, to keep their memories alive.
She keeps talking, however painful it is to relive the dreadful details of that day.
On October 7, she and her husband Avi, along with Maya’s two younger sisters, woke up to breaking news of an attack on Israel. But they didn’t realise Maya was at the festival.
Ayala tells me how they managed to reach Maya who insisted she was safe in a shelter. By then, they could see from the Find My Phone tool exactly where she was.
Still, Maya tried to protect them. Ayala shares with me a phone video, almost unbearable to watch, that shows her daughter crammed into a tiny concrete shelter alongside 39 others as machine guns fire outside. The family was only shown it much later.
“The last text we got came at 07.59” she says quietly. “She didn’t tell us they could hear terrorists. She didn’t want to make us worried. She was calm, she was quiet and she wasn’t panicking.”
Ayala nods slowly and takes a long breath before adding: “I think she knew.”
But it was four days before Maya’s family were able to find out her fate.
Having searched every hospital, they scoured every one of the videos put on social media by Hamas, graphically showing the dead and the wounded.
“We saw body parts and we knew Maya had a tattoo on her leg so if we saw a leg, we looked to see if there was a tattoo.
"We held out hope that she was hiding or a hostage.
“But on Wednesday evening we received the horrible news no mother or father ever wants to hear - that Maya was murdered and identified by DNA.”
They were advised not to see her, but have since come regularly to the festival site, now a memorial to the dead, their pictures standing tall amongst the trees.
This stretch of countryside is just a few kilometers from the border with Gaza.
As we speak, the ring of wind chimes hung in the trees is regularly punctured by the sound of mortars being fired into Gaza by the Israeli military.
It’s a chilling reminder that there is no end to the killing.
After a year of war, the numbers are unthinkable - the Health Ministry in Gaza puts the number of deaths there at more than 40,000 - the majority women and children.
Looking at videos of Maya’s life as a carefree student reminds me again that beyond the statistics on both sides, every life lost contained a whole world.
Suddenly there is another sound, drowning out the heavy weapons.
Maya’s mum is playing me a voicemail that her daughter left her many months before her death.
“She sent me a short bit of audio,” Ayala tells me and Maya’s voice rings out.
“Mum, I know you like my laugh! Have it ….and when you miss me you can listen to it”.
Her family listen to it quite often now. Ayala plays the message again. It’s a great laugh - loud, infectious, raucous.
The sound of pure joy after a year of unimaginable horror.
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