How Shoshan Haran Survived 50 Days in Hamas Captivity
The first apartment the terrorists hid their hostages in Gaza had a cardboard box in the corner of the room, beside a blue double sofa, teeming with toys. Winnie the Pooh. Two blue Smurfs, one donning a white moustache, beard and red hat, the other with a yellow hat and long mustache.For Dr. Shoshan Haran, the seemingly innocuous dolls pointed to something beyond imagination: that the Hamas-led terrorists who bulldozed, pillaged, burned, massacred, raped and kidnapped their way through southern Israel and through her tight-knit kibbutz, Be’eri, had planned in advance to take children captive.“It’s so vicious that it’s hard for me to express how you could use young children as bargaining chips,” she told The Post. Shoshan Haran, an Israeli agronomist and the founder and president of the Fair Planet nonprofit organization, is pictured on October 5, 2026. Brian Zak/NY PostHaran’s new book, “Mission in Captivity: One Woman’s Struggle to Survive and Save Her Family in Gaza,” recounts the 50 days she spent in Hamas captivity in Gaza, along with her daughter, two grandchildren, sister-in-law and niece. By the end of October 7, 2023, 102 members of the Be’eri community had been killed, including Haran’s husband, Avshalom, her younger sister, Lilach, as well as Lilach’s husband, Evyatar, and his caregiver, Paul. Tal Shoham, Haran’s son-in-law, was separated from his family and held for 505 days before his release.Unlike many hostages held in dark tunnels underground in Gaza, Haran was moved between different private homes above ground. The fourth apartment, she could tell, belonged “to a well-off family,” with soft carpets covering the living-room floor and a “lavish chandelier” hanging from the center of the ceiling. “By holding us within private family homes,” she said, “they use us as human shields. They understand that the IDF will refrain from striking locations where hostages are known to be, effectively turning our presence into a personal shield for the captors and their families.”Inside those homes, the most unsettling part of the book unfolds. The captors all called each other “Muhammad,” Haran writes, to conceal their identities. She focuses on one, whom she refers to as “Son Muhammad” and describes deliberately building a rapport with him. Shoshan Haran, her daughter and two grandchildren are seen on the day of their release from captivity, in this still from a video released by the Prime Office. Courtesy of Shoshan Haran“I understood that creating human interaction will improve our conditions,” she writes. “It was a way to get more attention and better treatment for the children.” An avid reader, Haran also drew on the wisdom and psychological techniques of Holocaust survivors to survive. “I understood that I could not show any weakness,” she told The Post. “Once you show weakness, you are going to be treated in a bad manner. I never cried during these 50 days. I demanded that they respect us.” After her release, she said, the head of Israel’s secret service told her that “the way I behaved and communicated with [the captors] greatly improved the way they treated us.” The rapport extended to the children, too. Her armed captors played Connect Four and indoor basketball with her grandchildren, Yahel, then 3, and Naveh, then 8, staged popcorn parties, blew bubbles and sat through plays the children invented. Haran goes so far as to say that Son Muhammad was “one of the people with the most acute emotional intelligence I have ever met.”She certainly doesn’t excuse his despicable actions, but Haran ponders: “If only Son Muhammad had received a different education, he and his friends could have developed their abilities and built better lives for themselves and their families. They could have become people who strove for peace, a bridge in the service of harmonious coexistence. Everything comes down to education.” Bullet holes are seen in the decorated window of a kindergarten and nursery school, destroyed during the attack by Hamas, at Be’eri. Getty ImagesHeld hostage a mere “twenty-minute drive” from her home in Be’eri, Haran said captivity felt like she was part of a “group of astronauts in a spaceship flying through a ruthless universe; only, unlike a real spaceship, this one is full of terrorists pointing their guns at us.” Haran’s life was meant to take a very different turn on October 7. She had already packed her suitcase for a flight to the Netherlands scheduled for that evening, where she was to meet seed producers who could work with her non-profit, Fair Planet, which provides high-quality seeds and modernized farming knowledge to local farmers in Africa. Three years on from the horrors of October 7, the failure of Israel’s military and border forces to prevent the assault on kibbutzim and the Nova Music Festival — where almost 400 people were killed and 44 taken hostage — remains misunderstood.Haran blames an over-reliance on technology. Haran has a new book coming out about her ordeal. Brian Zak/NY Post“The main problem was that the IDF and other security bodies were relying too much on high-tech sensors and cameras and neglected watching the border with officers and soldiers guarding in real time,” she told The Post.Only an “independent, structured investigative committee will get to the real roots of this big failure,” she adds. She is equally critical of international institutions. Her only “interaction” with the United Nations in Gaza came when her captors “gave the children notebooks by UNRWA.” Shoshan Haran and her late husband, Avshalom, pose in an anemone field in Kibbutz Be’eri in 2012. Courtesy of Shoshan HaranAfter her release, Haran addressed the United Nations Security Council in May 2024 at the invitation of former US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield, in a session focused on “condemning hostage-taking in Israel on October 7 as a psychological tool of terrorism.”Her message, she said, was simple: “If you care about the Palestinian people in Gaza like me, the only thing you need to focus on is the release of all the hostages because this is what’s kept the war so long and this is what made the Palestinians miserable.” As soon as she finished, Haran notes, China and Russia, both veto-wielding permanent members of the UN Security Council, refrained from condemning Hamas’ actions, “so the UN Security Council was not even able to designate Hamas as a terrorist organization.”As for the future of Kibbutz Be’eri, her birthplace and the community her parents helped found, Haran remains hopeful that “90 percent of the people” displaced from there will return by July 2027. Jonathan Harounoff is a British author and the host of “UNscripted with Jonathan Harounoff.”
