The family of Israeli hostage Eden Yerushalmi, 24, decided to release on Thursday the phone call held between her and the Israeli Police emergency call center before she was kidnapped from the Nova Music Festival on October 7.
In the call, Yerushalmi told the dispatcher, "I’m running, please stay with me, I’m begging you." The dispatcher asked the young woman to hide and asked for details about her exact location. "Do you see them near you? Try to hide. Are you in the forest?" the dispatcher asked Yerushalmi.
Later, she asked Yerushalmi to hang up while voices speaking in Arabic could be heard in the background. "Hide, try to find a place to hide, put your phone on silent mode so they don't hear it if it rings, and stay available, okay?" she instructed. Before ending the call, Yerushalmi pleaded, "Please find me, okay?"
Eden Yerushalmi worked as a bartender at the music festival near Kibbutz Re'im. Her sisters, Shani and Mai Yerushalmi, previously shared that she "called us when the sirens started to say they were shutting down the party and packing up. We told her ‘It’s okay, we're waiting for you at home,’ and went back to sleep.
“An hour later she called Mom, we heard her screaming and jumped out of bed in a panic. We stayed on the line with her until 11:00 a.m. Eden was hiding in a car with two of her friends who were murdered, and she played dead. Most of the time we were silent, holding her hand through the phone. Occasionally, she whispered that she could hear her friends' blood dripping. She was terribly scared."
"We told her to listen to us alone, and we tried to calm her down. We whispered to her that we were with her and she should stay quiet," the sisters recounted. "She heard trucks and debated whether to lift her head up, thinking maybe the police had come to help. We told her not to take the risk. All the while, we heard gunfire in the background. It was awful.
“Suddenly, someone at the party opened the car door, and they started running together. After ten minutes, she found a bush to hide in. The guy she was with disappeared, and she told us she thought they caught him,” they added.
“She stayed in that bush for two and a half hours until she heard people approaching and told us on the phone, 'They caught me.' We heard someone saying in Arabic, 'Ta'al,' come. She told him she didn't understand, and he shouted and disconnected her phone. That's when we realized she was abducted."
"We haven't heard from her since,” they said. “We don't know in what condition she’s in, but we know that as of 11:00 a.m. on October 7, she was healthy and in one piece - and that's how we demand she returns."