She was Noa Argamani, one of about 250 Israeli hostages taken captive by Hamas.
Her 245th day in captivity had started like most others until, shortly after 11 a.m., she heard a knock at the door, followed by yelling. Suddenly, the room was filled with Israeli soldiers. “You are being rescued!” they shouted in Hebrew.
“They simply came, just like that,” Argamani, 26, would tell her close friend Yan Gorjaltsan hours later.
The rescue operation on Saturday that freed four Israeli hostages and killed more than 270 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials, was one of the most dramatic and deadly episodes of Israel’s war against Hamas. This account is based on more than a dozen interviews with former and current Israeli military officials, family members of hostages, and Palestinian eyewitnesses, as well as analysis of verified video footage.
Argamani and three other Israeli hostages would be extracted from central Gaza and reunited with family in a complex daylight operation involving thousands of troops, technicians and analysts.
It was planned for weeks and executed smoothly, Israeli officials said, until the tight commando raid turned into a firefight with militants. The Israeli military responded with a massive aerial assault on the crowded streets of Nuseirat.
The bombs kept falling and the streets echoed with screams, Abu Asi said.
It was like “doomsday.”
The operation was months in the making.
Since Oct. 7, Israeli intelligence units, with help from their U.S. counterparts, have studied digital clues, drone footage and intercepts to locate the hostages. Recently, they locked in on Nuseirat as the current location for four captives who had been taken from a desert dance rave just outside the border fence with Gaza.
Among them was Argamani, whose wrenching pleas for mercy were among the defining images from the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel. Officials from the Israel Defense Forces said they knew she had been moved around Gaza more than once during her in time in captivity. Analysts confirmed she was now being held alone in a first-floor apartment; three other hostages — Almog Meir Jan, 22, Andrey Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 41 — were on the third floor of a building nearby.
Planning began in tight secrecy. Mock-ups of the two buildings were constructed for troops to rehearse in, officials said. It mirrored the preparations undertaken by Israeli commandos before their famed rescue of more than 100 hostages in Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976.
For weeks, members of Yamam, a special counterterrorism unit; Shin Bet, the country’s internal security agency; and the IDF drilled over and over for a rare daylight mission.
“We understood that in those apartments with those guards, daytime will be the ultimate surprise,” said Adm. Daniel Hagari, an IDF spokesman.
It would mean greater risk getting into and out of the buildings. And it would mean more Palestinian civilians on the streets.
Some soldiers who took part in the drills did not know their exact purpose, officials said.
“Keeping it a secret was one of the most difficult things,” a commander in the Givati Brigade identified as Lt. Col. Ziv said in an account of the operation published by the IDF.
Commanders waited for the right moment, deploying military earthmovers to prepare the ground inside Gaza.
“We worked on the roads around Nuseirat and in the nearby city of Deir al-Balah, so that vehicles could pass easily at the moment of truth,” said Maj. Eliav, commander of the Kfir Brigade, whom the IDF identified only by his last name and position in accordance with its rules.
Finally, by Thursday, the military was ready to move. A meeting of the Security Cabinet was canceled to prevent leaks, according to an Israeli official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with a small group of senior security leaders that night to greenlight the plan.
‘We have the diamond’
On Saturday morning, IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi; Ronen Bar, the head of Shin Bet; and Hagari crowded into a command room lined with video monitors.
At 11 a.m., Halevi said, “Go.”
Thousands of personnel were involved in the operation, IDF officials said. It took about 25 minutes for special forces to drive from Israel to Nuseirat. How they got there is still unclear.
Palestinian witnesses described some troops arriving in two undercover vehicles, one of which resembled the trucks used by Israel to bring commercial goods into Gaza. The other was a white Mercedes truck, piled high with furniture and other belongings, a common sight in a camp that’s home to thousands of displaced families.
“The IDF made no use of any civilian trucks,” the military said in a statement.
Two videos verified by The Washington Post show a box truck marked with a brand of dishwashing soap traveling in the company of Israeli armored vehicles on a road about a mile west of the raid. The vehicles head west, away from Nuseirat, and it is unclear whether the videos were filmed before or after the raid.
The white Mercedes is visible in a third verified video filmed from the balcony of a residential building in the center of the camp. Two ladders can be seen resting against the side of a house, leading to an upper floor next to the truck. “Here they have arrived,” says the voice of the woman who furtively filmed the six-second scene.
Hussam al-Arouqi, 33, was returning from the bakery with his brother Issam, he recounted, when two men in plainclothes and about 10 heavily armed soldiers poured out of the back of the Mercedes. The soldiers opened fire, hitting his brother three times, he said.
“He fell to the ground and started bleeding” and tried to crawl away, Hussam said, adding that Apache helicopters were flying low overhead.
It was more than an hour, he said, before it was safe enough to reach Issam and take him to the hospital in a donkey-drawn cart. Issam remains in critical condition.
Israeli troops succeeded in reaching Argamani’s apartment without tipping off her guards, according to Hagari, who was watching video feeds from drones circling above and soldiers’ helmet cameras. Almost simultaneously, other units entered the building holding the three male hostages, about 220 yards away.
“In Noa Argamani’s building, we surprised them completely,” Hagari said.
The stunned young woman was bustled down the stairs into a vehicle and driven to a helicopter waiting nearby.
Soldiers relayed the good news with a coded phrase: “We have the diamond in our hand.”
The chopper lifted off, heading for a hospital near Tel Aviv. At 12:20 p.m., Argamani’s family was told she was free.
By then, the operation in Nuseirat had gone off course. The guards with the three male hostages had not been taken by surprise. A Yamam commander was shot as they entered the building. A firefight erupted, exposing the covert mission.
“Immediately, it became a war zone,” said Amir Avivi, a reservist brigadier general and former deputy commander of the IDF’s Gaza division who was briefed on the operation.
The soldiers were able to get the three hostages and the injured man into a vehicle, but it broke down under Hamas fire from rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, officials said. At one point, Avivi said, they were forced to abandon the vehicle and seek refuge in a building nearby.
The commanders called for air support.
“The air force started shooting to give them a corridor, a wall of fire,” said retired Maj. Gen. David Tsur, a former Yamam commander.
Explosions rocked the narrow streets, which have only grown more crowded in recent weeks with families displaced by Israel’s offensive in southern Gaza.
There was carnage everywhere, Abu Asi said, including dead women and children. The roads were filled with “tanks, artillery, body parts and injured … nothing but a hall of blood.”
He commandeered the tuk-tuk he used for moving his merchandise and ferried some two dozen dead and injured people to al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, where he said bodies covered the floor.
“They were shooting and targeting everything,” paramedic Abdel Hamid Ghorab said from nearby al-Awda Hospital, which struggled to treat the rush of wounded. “None of us could even tell what happened outside.”
The Gaza Health Ministry said at least 274 people were killed; it was unclear how many were combatants.
On social media, people frantically shared news of airstrikes and troop movements, posting names and photos of loved ones they were separated from. Later came tributes to the dead.
“Aircraft struck dozens of military targets for the success of the operation,” the IDF said in a statement. “Hamas, in a very cruel and cynical way, is holding hostages inside civilian buildings.”
The Israeli forces, with the three hostages, battled away from the market and eventually reached the beach. Not far from the temporary pier built by the U.S. Navy to deliver humanitarian aid, a second helicopter was waiting.
The rescued captives scrambled inside and the wounded officer was loaded. He would later die of his injuries.
The chopper hurried the three hostages to freedom as the war raged behind them.
Rubin reported from Tel Aviv, Morris from Berlin, Farouk Mahfouz from Cairo and Harb from London. Hazem Balousha in Cairo, Miriam Berger in Jerusalem and Evan Hill in New York contributed to this report.
