Former hostage Iair Horn declared honored guest of Buenos Aires, shares story of Gaza captivity

OCTOBER 7, 2026 17:48Former Hamas hostage Iair Horn said he considers it his responsibility to keep telling his story in interviews, public speaking events, and any other forum he can, according to a series of interviews with Argentinian media on Monday, after being declared an honored guest of Buenos Aires.“It is my responsibility, that is how I see it, that is how we understand it in my family, and that is why I speak," he explained. "I have a story to tell, and I tell it. It is part of my responsibility as a human being, as a Jew, and also because of the way I was raised.”Horn described his first awareness of the October 7 attack on his community of Kibbutz Nir Oz. A siren going off was routine, he said, but then the kibbutz's internal communication system announced that terrorists were inside the community, and he began to hear gunshots and screams.Horn and his brother, Eitan, hid in the safe room, but Horn was forced to emerge with his hands raised after Hamas terrorists began shooting through the door. He said that he hoped that, by shielding the doorway with his body, he could hide Eitan from the terrorists' view.“They took the first people, and Eitan stayed behind; he stayed at the house. But he did what he could, and some time later they took him too,” Horn recalled.‘He told me to leave him’: Former hostage Iair Horn recounts running from missiles in Gaza with brother who remains captive. (credit: Ran Malmed )Horn was taken to the Gaza Strip on a motorcycle, where his abductors repeatedly shouted that he was a Jew, leading the crowd to beat him."Punches, punches, punches," Horn said, describing how his captors would stop every few hundred meters to allow more people to abuse him.He was taken down into tunnels below Gaza, "the biggest maze I have ever had to visit in my life," where five days later he would be reunited with his brother. The two would spend the rest of Horn's time in captivity together.The worst aspect of the situation, Horn explained, was the psychological torment.“Nobody cares about you. Tomorrow I kill you, tomorrow I kill your brother, tomorrow we blow up the whole tunnel with everyone inside,” he explained. “The physical part, one way or another, you suffer from it more or less, but you can recover from it."'The most normal thing was to accept that this was my reality'His survival strategy, he said, was to accept all that he was going through.“For me, the most normal thing was to accept that this was my reality. Okay, now I live down here, I live here in the tunnel. That's it, yes, I live here. I shower once a month. This is my reality. If I think all the time about my family, about something else that I had outside, that is when you go crazy. The moment I accept that it is here, that I am here, then I am calmer.”Another trick he used to cope with his imprisonment was to consider himself to be dead.“I was already underground," he said. "The moment I decided that, every second, every minute, every hour, every day was a gain.”Eventually, after 498 days in captivity, Horn was released in a ceasefire deal, leaving his brother behind, which he called "the worst moment, the worst day of the entire captivity.”Horn dismissed the idea of humanity in his captors.“You could count those moments on the fingers of one hand," he said. "It is not enough. The numbers don't add up for it to be something worth highlighting.”He also said that he cannot fully hate, describing a time when a young boy tried to stab his brother Eitan during their captivity.“That kid is not to blame; he was educated, badly educated. I can't hate him, but I can send him very far away.”Argentina is not antisemitic, Buenos Aires legislator saysDuring a ceremony for Horn in Buenos Aires on Monday, City Legislator Waldo Wolff addressed the October 7 massacre.“Of the 197 countries in the world, only 39 condemned Hamas,” Wolff said. “It seems that for some people Jews do not count when they are murdered. Jews will never again get on the trains going to Auschwitz.”He added that Argentina, in his view, was not an antisemitic country.“I always say that there are antisemites, but Argentina is not an antisemitic country. This does not appear through spontaneous generation. It is built through communication. If barbarism becomes normalized, it advances.”Follow us on Google