During the Hamas attack on the Nahal Oz base on October 7, Karina Ariev briefly spoke with her parents twice before sending a farewell message to her family. Karina, one of five female IDF lookouts still held captive, was seen in a harrowing abduction video released last week.
Her sister, Sasha, who has paused her studies in brain sciences to fight for her sister's release, revealed the contents of Karina's final message in an interview with the British Daily Mail published on Sunday.
"I could see the understanding in her eyes, and few minutes later she sent me a message that if she won't leave, if she won't make it out alive, she asked me to keep our parents safe and to be strong and not to wallow in sorrow but to continue living," she told The Mail.
"She didn't tell my parents to worry about me. She told me to take care of our parents. That's who we are. We are strong. This is the bond we have, and we are dealing with this together."
According to The Mail, the message was sent shortly before the abduction, which was captured in a video the families chose to release.
This difficult decision aimed to pressure the government into expediting a deal for their release. The heavily edited and censored video shows a disoriented 19-year-old Karina, still in her Snoopy pajamas, being taunted alongside other abducted soldiers: Liri Albag, 19, Naama Levy, 19, Daniela Gilboa, 20, and Agam Berger, 19. In the clip, the terrorists can be heard using the Arabic term "Sabaya" – implying "concubines" – suggesting a threat of sexual assault.
The full video
Sasha, 24, revealed that the video, as difficult as it is to watch, is all she has left of her sister. "They so brutally took her in her Snoopy pajamas with Kalashnikovs around - like a movie scene. But I watch it again and again and realize it's not, and you are just living this day all over again," she said.
Describing her sister's demeanor in the video, Sasha said she saw fear and helplessness in Karina's eyes.
"I could see her eyes pleading for help," she said. 'I could see helplessness. Like she is a little baby looking for help. Like, 'please help me. I don't know what is going on here. There are grenades. I'm wounded. My best friend is lying dead in front of me.'
"From this despair and fear and helplessness, I think I saw a look in her eyes that she just understood that this could be the end," she said. "I think she thought, "is that how death looks like?" I think she thought that this is the end, and she is all on her own now.'
Sasha described a "cosmic bond" between her and sister Karina, emphasizing their deep understanding of each other without the need for words.
"I can realize what is going on in her head just through her body movement, body language and her eyes," she said.
Releasing the video, while agonizing, was driven by the fear of stalled negotiations. "We just realized now that we are almost eight months, that people are forgetting and that there is no deal in the horizon and we do not know where we are going through," Sasha explained.
"So we thought that instead of talking, we will just show this video and the evidence will talk for itself," she added. "We wanted people to see and to maybe feel a little of the pain that we're feeling every day. To understand that when we close our eyes, this is what we see. And even worse."
The full 15-minute video remains unreleased, with the public only seeing a 3-minute and 10-second version. "The public must remember that this is a censored video," Sasha said. "There are a lot of corpses of other girls who were murdered. It is much, much harder than this video. If people thought this video was hard, the full video is even harder."
Since the video's release, the government has renewed efforts to restart negotiations with Hamas, with talks expected in Cairo as early as Tuesday. Sasha's message to the government is clear: prioritize lives over politics.
"[A]s long people are doing politics, people are dying there," she told The Mail and implored the public to join their fight. "I think people must wake up and help us because we cannot fight our war and we are running out of our force, because we are despaired. And it's very hard to keep up with the hope.
"We need people from around the world and from Israel to fight with us so people will understand. There are young girls, they're only 19 years old, and they must come out of there. For 122 days, and they're still not here, just girls."