Voices from the tunnels: a chilling reminder of the ordeal of the hostages in Gaza

It’s lunchtime on a sunny but bitterly cold day in east London. The air carries with it a whiff of incense along with those of hot dogs and traffic fumes. A red bus pushes its way along the main road and in so doing reveals, on a side street, a poster of a Palestinian flag on a lamp post. Several turnings and a few hundred yards further along is a rubble-strewn yard. Visitors who keep walking will soon find themselves at the entrance to a hospital in Gaza.

A motorcycle parked nearby was used to abduct partygoers from the Nova festival in southern Israel during the Hamas atrocities of 7 October. And right there, easy to miss, hidden in plain sight, is the entrance to a Hamas tunnel.

Voices from the Tunnels is a dauntingly realistic recreation in a disused warehouse of the conditions in which many of the hostages in Gaza were kept, and in which about 132 of the more than 200 taken are believed still to be held. It opens, at a location that is not being publicised, on Monday 15 January, and Jewish News was given a preview.

Put together in little more than a week, the installation is the latest of the many efforts of Orit Eyal-Fibeesh, the London-based Israeli who set up the 7/10 Human Chain Project, which is dedicated to bringing all the hostages home, and with the help of fellow Israelis Yael di Castro, Hila Loski-Widger and Ofer Shabi. “This is an exercise in education and raising awareness,” Orit says. It is also part of events to mark 100 days since the hostages were taken captive.

Orit and her team aim to bring 500 or more people to visit the tunnels and are inviting academics, MPs, faith leaders and celebrities. “Anyone who can then talk about what they have seen,” she says. The hope is that they will use their influence to keep pushing for more hostage releases. Orit, a logistics expert who has lived in the UK for 20 years, adds: “We need to shout for the hostages and we need to ask every organisation to help us.”

In the dimly lit rooms are the voices, and faces, of the freed hostages. Maya Regev, 21, whose leg was badly injured, and her brother Itay, 18, who was also shot, are on a TV screen telling an interviewer about their surgery in captivity, without anaesthetic.

On another screen Yocheved Lipshitz, 85, recalls her underground hell: the spider’s web of damp tunnels. In the next room a child mannequin, seated on a mattress on the floor, is 12-year-old Eitan Yahalomi: he is being forced to watch a recording of the 7 October atrocities. Along another corridor, past a makeshift morgue, a terrorist in the operations room studies photos of Israeli military hardware, a prayer mat next to his table. Several rockets, Arabic labels on their side, lean against a wall.

After coming back up to ground level, the invited visitors will have the opportunity to enter a screening room and watch the 43-minute footage of the Hamas atrocities, compiled by the Israel Defence Forces. The film is now in its 19th iteration, with the IDF continually adding footage as it comes to light.

More than three months into the Israel-Hamas war, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and concerns about a wider Middle East conflict are growing and are in the foreground of many people’s minds. And, more than 100 days into their captivity, more than a hundred hostages are still being held by Hamas. Orit will not rest until they are all home and Voices from the Tunnels turns up the volume on her campaign.