Sapir Cohen and Sasha Troufanov lay completely still beneath the bed in the small guest apartment next to Troufanov parents’ home. Outside, hundreds of terrorists swarmed Kibbutz Nir Oz, shouting “Allah Akbar” over and over, their voices growing closer. Some were trying to smash through the aluminum-and-glass door. Cohen prayed silently, begging God to keep them hidden, to make the attackers turn back.
For a moment, it seemed her prayers were answered — the terrorists moved on. But two minutes later, another group arrived. This time, they fired at the door and burst inside.
It felt like a scene from a horror movie, except it was real. Within seconds, the gunmen found them — a young couple covered in a blanket, hiding under the bed like children praying the monsters wouldn’t find them.
Just the night before, Oct. 6, they were playing Jenga with friends at the kibbutz — Arbel Yahud, Shani Goren and Ariel Cunio — all of whom were also taken hostage. Life seemed so normal and safe, now their lives were about to change forever.
Sitting with The Journal, Cohen, 31, and Troufanov, 30, recounted the day leading up to their abduction.
“We had a small argument about whether to go or not to the kibbutz,” said Troufanov. “I didn’t want to go. I had a bad feeling for some reason. Also, my mom was going to celebrate her birthday the following week, and I didn’t want to go to the kibbutz week after week.”
Troufanov and Cohen had met on a dating app the year before. They had moved in together to an apartment in Ramat Gan two months earlier, even though neither of them was certain about the relationship. “We kept thinking that we should break up but each one of us kept it to himself so we wouldn’t make things worse,” Cohen admitted. “So when Sasha said he didn’t want to go to the kibbutz, I convinced him to go because if we stayed, we would fight — besides, I loved going to the kibbutz.”
On the way to the bus station, Cohen realized she had forgotten her bathing suit and ran back home. They nearly missed the last bus but made it just in time. On the ride, they sat near a soldier, and Sasha spoke with him about the division in Israel — and how only something radical, “like a war,” he said, might bring Israelis back together and reunite the nation.
Less than 24 hours later, he was taken hostage. Cohen spent 55 days in Gaza under Hamas captivity, Troufanov, 498 days under the Islamic Jihad.
“Six months earlier, I had terrible anxieties, I was sure I’m going to die but I didn’t know why,” said Cohen. “I stayed home a lot and every time I went into our apartment or the bedroom I used to lock the doors. Finally, when it got so bad, I decided to pray for the first time in my life. One day I saw on Instagram a Psalms verse about healing and recovery. I learned the prayer — it talked about war and asking God to save me from my enemies.”
Cohen had no idea what war or enemies she was asking God to save her from, but nonetheless she read it faithfully, unaware that she would soon rely on it in her darkest moment.
“I don’t know how, but I remembered that entire prayer as I was lying under the bed and I said to God, if I’m going to stay alive, I promise to observe Shabbat. I heard the terrorists and the kibbutz members screaming outside, and a lot of shooting. I was sure this was the end. I thought about all the things in life I hadn’t tried, all the dreams I didn’t fulfill, and how I didn’t do something important or significant with my life. I said, if I’ll have another chance, I’ll change that. I was thinking to send my parents and Sasha’s parents a text but didn’t want to say farewell words, so I just kept praying.”
“I thought about all the things in life I hadn’t tried, all the dreams I didn’t fulfill, and how I didn’t do something important or significant with my life. I said, if I’ll have another chance, I’ll change that.”
– Sapir Cohen
The terrorists who entered the small guest house began looking for them. Cohen and Troufanov were able to see their boots. The terrorists flipped the mattress of the twin bed near the front door, and next they headed toward their bed.
They had no choice. They crawled out, their hands up in the air. In front of them stood 10 armed terrorists. Sapir was dragged outside to a motorcycle that was ready to take her to Gaza. Troufanov was punched in the face and was bleeding. On his way out, one of the Palestinian civilians stabbed him in the shoulder from the back.
“He wasn’t wearing any uniform, and he was holding a regular kitchen knife. He was ready to stab me again and clearly intended to kill me, but the other terrorists stopped him. I was taken outside and as I looked around, I saw dozens of terrorists — I was shocked. I didn’t believe how many of them were there. I felt I had to do something or I’d die. I shoved the ones who were holding me away and started running. I saw many terrorists all over the kibbutz — some of them were burning things, some taking apart balconies. They saw me and started throwing things at me. I understood that the situation was much worse than I thought.”
With terrorists and Palestinian civilians in every direction, Troufanov knew it was pointless to keep running and stopped. In front of him were two armed terrorists; behind him were more. He raised his hands in surrender. Someone was screaming at him in Arabic, but he didn’t understand what he was saying. The next thing he knew, he was shot at. The first bullet hit his right leg, tearing through the muscle. The second hit his left leg, smashing the bones, and he fell. Then the terrorists approached him and hit him on the head with the rifle stock.
“They ordered me to get up, but as much as I tried, I couldn’t. I signaled to them that I was unable to. I felt that at this point they had no use for me and were going to kill me, but they picked me up and put me on a motorcycle between two terrorists.”
The motorcycle made its way to Gaza, a short distance from the kibbutz. Troufanov tried to keep his injured leg steady, but it was difficult with his hands tied behind his back. As they arrived in Gaza, he saw a chilling sight — hundreds of Palestinians celebrating and getting ready to lynch him. “It was kind of ecstasy, a frenzy; they began gathering around me, screaming and cursing. I started feeling them kicking and punching me. I told myself, okay, I’m going to die now, and my only comfort was that it doesn’t hurt anymore.”
Luckily for him, the kidnappers wanted him alive and started moving the crowd away from him. They got him into a car and started driving. Troufanov was hopeful they were going to the hospital, but instead, they took him to an apartment building.
“We got into this apartment, and inside was a family with kids, parents and elderly people. They took me to one of the rooms and closed the door. The homeowner entered the room and looked at them like asking, what am I supposed to do with him?”
Troufanov, who would later find out he was taken by the Islamic Jihad, was in severe pain. His hope of getting medical treatment was completely shattered as he watched the elderly man break a broomstick in two and tie it to his bleeding left foot.
“I told them that Sapir and I were married, and when they interrogated me and asked what I did in the army, I lied and said that I used to work at the military supply unit.”
What Troufanov didn’t know at the time was the huge casualty to Israel and that he was one of 76 hostages taken from Nir Oz – among them his mother and grandmother. He also didn’t know that 47 kibbutz members had been murdered, including his father, Vitaly, who was 50 years old. He would learn about his father’s fate only upon his release.
Meanwhile, in another part of town, Cohen received the same welcoming party as her boyfriend. “When I arrived in Gaza, I saw many civilians in the street. It was packed, and a lot of people were holding cameras and sticks. I looked at everyone, and I wanted them to film me so that my family would know I’d been kidnapped. I looked in every direction and tried to smile so my mother wouldn’t panic. And then everyone came and started pulling my hair and touching me.”
Just before things would completely go out of hand, the terrorists placed a shirt over Cohen’s head and rushed her away and into a car.
Recalling her feelings at the time, Cohen said she was actually relieved. “I was mostly scared when I was in the guestroom hiding under the bed. After, when I got to Gaza, I was in a sort of euphoria, like ‘wow, I’m alive.’”
On their way to the apartment where she would be held captive, Hamas terrorists gave her a short drive throughout the city — a bizarre, ‘Welcome to Gaza’ tour.
“They said, see what Israel has done to us, see how they’ve ruined Gaza.”
Cohen was taken first to an apartment and then to the tunnels through a makeshift elevator that took her deep underground. “The first tunnel was tiled with ceramic. At first, I didn’t realize that these were the tunnels that are spoken of in the news. From there, I was transferred to an apartment, and each time me and the other hostages were moved to a new location, we were going through those tunnels.”
In the first apartment, she was with two other hostages — a 35-year-old man and a 16-year-old girl. “They were worried about their families and didn’t know if they were alive or not. I knew my family was alive and well, except for Sasha. So, I was in a better state than they were.”
While being held by Hamas, Cohen tried to take on the role of a leader, even though she never felt like one before. “I was taking responsibility to make sure everything that was needed was taken care of, like food, water, clothing. Once I did that, I also felt good about myself. I didn’t know what would happen to me, but at least God gave me the chance to do something important, and if I die, then at least I’ll know that right before, I did something meaningful in my life,” she said.
Communicating with the terrorists wasn’t easy. Only one of them spoke English, and the other spoke very little Hebrew. They used a lot of body language to communicate. “They were between 23 and 37 years old, and the younger they were, the more they hated and were angrier. There were days we ate only one pita and little water, and there were some other days we had more.”
For 55 days, Cohen was moved between apartments and the tunnels. A few days before she was released, she saw Yahya Sinwar, Hamas leader. She recognized him immediately.
“He said, I don’t want to kill you, but this is our place and our land. You [Israelis] need to leave.”
Sinwar needed to choose women with small children and elderly women to be released, and for some reason, he thought Cohen was under 18. “He pointed at everyone who was going to be released and said I would also be released,” said Cohen. “But one of the terrorists told him, ‘No, she’s not going. She’s 29. She is too old,” she laughed.
But just before the first group was set to be released, Israel rejected the deal, as two of the hostages on the list had died. They needed to release live hostages first. That’s how Cohen found herself released on Nov. 30, 2023.
Troufanov was three and a half years old when he and his family made aliyah from Russia. His first memory, he said, was from Kibbutz Nir Oz, where his parents and grandmother had moved. He spent all his childhood there. At the time he was abducted, he was working as an electrical engineer in Amazon’s cloud division (AWS), on a team developing artificial intelligence chips.
For the first few weeks of captivity, Troufanov was held in an apartment. His leg received an improvised splint, a brace made of a piece of mesh metal wrapped around his leg with bandages. It dug into his skin and irritated the open wound. After a week, they decided there was no choice and took him to the hospital, where he finally received a cast – which soon broke. Then they returned him to another apartment and moved him between various locations. “You understand that your chance of dying increases. They guarded me so that if the Israeli army arrived, they would kill me,” he said.
In Rafah, Troufanov was kept in an apartment where they built a wooden cage about 3 feet by 6 and a half feet. They draped the cage with thick carpet, completely isolating him. He tried to stay positive and told himself he could at least move a little in the cage because they couldn’t see him.
In June 2024, the terrorists felt it was too dangerous to keep him above ground and took him to the tunnels. “We reached a chamber 30 meters underground. It was very poorly built — grains of sand and dirt kept falling on my head. I’m 6’3’’ and the tunnel was low, 5’5’’, so I constantly had to bend down. It was also very narrow; you couldn’t even stretch your arms to the side,” Troufanov remembered.
“The place was filled with cockroaches, mice and a lot of creatures that I didn’t even know existed. You had to relieve yourself close to where you slept, and it stank terribly. There wasn’t any access to a shower, except every 10 days, they gave me some water in a bucket to wash myself, but I had to measure it and calculate exactly how much to use.”
Drinking water was another matter — it was scarce, dirty and salty.
“I was kept completely alone. There were moments when I would bang my head against the wall just to feel something. You feel like you’re buried alive with no light at all, it’s completely dark at least half of the day. The tunnel also has no sound, so you feel utter loneliness.”
“I was kept completely alone. There were moments when I would bang my head against the wall just to feel something. You feel like you’re buried alive with no light at all, it’s completely dark at least half of the day. The tunnel also has no sound, so you feel utter loneliness.” – Sasha Troufanov
It’s one thing to be held in captivity with other people, and it’s another to be held all alone, with no one to talk to, no one to share your pain, memories or hopes with. No one to comfort you. Buried underground, in darkness and silence, that’s where Troufanov found God.
He had never believed in God before, but he needed to cling to something, to have hope. So he prayed, not sure why, not sure if God even cared or existed at all. “I needed to do something to free the anger I felt, and the more I stepped out of my own bubble and stopped focusing on my own misery, the more that anger and resentment faded,” said Troufanov. “At the same time, I reached a point where I was talking to myself, and slowly that turned into a kind of prayer. I don’t know Psalms; I prayed straight from the heart and soul and it gave me so much strength. It grounded me, cleansed me, helped me look at things in a positive way, and held on to hope.”
“At first I was criticizing myself — asking why was I doing this, if it was just because I was desperate and trying to escape reality? but then again, I couldn’t deny the fact that it empowered me. So I kept doing it, and the more I prayed, the more I thought about what God is and where that shows up in life. I thought about everything I had gone through, the miracles that had happened to me, how I was so close to dying so many times but survived, and then you start believing that everything is part of a plan.”
During his time in captivity, Troufanov learned Arabic by listening to his captors. He tried to make friends with them, hoping he would at least have someone to talk to and perhaps they would be nicer to him. Most weren’t interested, and he noticed something telling: the younger they were, the meaner they tended to be.
“You try to make yourself likable, try to produce a positive interaction even if it wasn’t in the sincerest way. You don’t want to play the tough guy and then get a bullet in the head — that doesn’t help anyone. There were those who didn’t want to talk with me, but luckily there were those who gave me an opening. Sometimes they said difficult things in order to hurt me, and all you can do is just nod. They said that Sapir had found another man after she was released, and that Israel doesn’t want to bring me back — all sorts of things.”
Troufanov learned to listen and keep his mouth shut. He didn’t want to antagonize them or argue. Some of the things they said, though, he believed. He wasn’t sure if Cohen would still be waiting for him. Given their imperfect relationship, it made sense that she might have moved on. Besides, he had been held hostage for too long.
His captors videotaped him a few times, sometimes giving him specific scripts to read, sometimes just a general idea. If he didn’t pass the “audition” successfully, they made him do a retake.
Shortly before his release, Troufanov was told a deal had been reached, but he didn’t want to raise his hopes only to have them crushed. A month before he was released, he was moved to an apartment in Khan Yunis. He was extremely thin and dirty.
“Suddenly they started giving me three meals a day and sneakers a few times a day,” said Troufanov. That was a sign that maybe, indeed, there was a chance he would be sent back home.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad often try to fatten up their hostages so they won’t look emaciated.
On Feb. 15, he crossed the border and was greeted by his mother, grandmother and Sapir. That’s when he learned that his father had not survived. “It was emotionally difficult — there was no maybe, no uncertainty, it was definite: my father had died,” he said. The reunion with his family and Sapir was captured by cameras and brought many to tears.
“Coming back to freedom after a long period in captivity is a complex process. You carry certain habits of being a prisoner, and it takes time to adjust to freedom,” Troufanov said. “Suddenly you’re a recognized person — not something I had expected. You have to figure out how to handle that, what to do with this new identity. It’s a personal process: trying to understand what your purpose is now.”
One thing he and Sapir didn’t expect was that they would fall in love with each other again. They spent the first night talking until dawn, and the experience bonded them forever. They suddenly rediscovered each other. In July, five months after his release, he proposed. Sapir said yes, and the couple is planning a March 2026 wedding.
In August, Troufanov had surgery to repair the damage in his leg. The bones had fused badly, making it shorter than the other leg. It will take months to heal. When I met them, Troufanov was using crutches and hopping on his right foot. He hopes it will heal properly.
The couple had arrived in the U.S. for speaking engagements, traveling east from the West Coast. The experience in captivity had made them reconsider what they want to do with their lives. Cohen earned a degree in software engineering and studied for four and a half years at a college in Karmiel, but she hasn’t returned to working in the field.
“The truth is, my priorities changed,” she said. “I realized software engineering wasn’t what interested me and it frustrated me to think that’s what I’d do. It took me a long time to get my degree, so I was afraid to start over. Before I didn’t have the courage to make a change, but after I came back, I returned braver than I was before. I’m not going to follow a path that doesn’t suit me. I don’t yet have a set plan, but I think my next steps will involve people more than computers. I’m looking for something meaningful.”
“I have a desire to connect people to Israel,” said Troufanov about his future plans. “It was important for the terrorists to tell me repeatedly that I shouldn’t return to live in Israel, and they hinted that maybe I should go to Russia. They don’t want us in Israel.”
That’s why, he said, he wants to encourage Jews in the Diaspora to buy a home there.
Troufanov is collaborating with RHF (Roots Heritage Future), which specializes in curating and developing unique properties for clients. He is still figuring out his long-term plans, but for now, he is concentrating on healing and his future with Sapir.
They both observe Shabbat now, a promise Sapir made while lying under the bed.
“We hope to build a home in Israel and have as many children as possible, especially daughters,” said Troufanov. “It feels like victory. We’ve been through something difficult, and we choose to grow and move forward, focusing on the future rather than letting it destroy us.”
