An Israeli woman who was held hostage in Iraq for two-and-a-half years has revealed the horrific sexual abuse and torture she was forced to endure.
Elizabeth Tsurkov, 38, said members of Kata’ib Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia that has been designated a terrorist organisation by the US, ‘whipped [her] all over’ almost immediately after she was kidnapped in 2023.
‘They basically used me as a punching bag’, she told the New York Times.
Elizabeth, a doctoral student at Princeton University in New Jersey, was kidnapped in March 2023 after being stood up by a woman who had asked to meet her at a Baghdad coffee shop to help research ISIS.
The researcher, who was in Iraq to study the Shiite movement, agreed after the woman said they had a mutual friend.
But this person never showed up. Instead, as Elizabeth walked home, she was kidnapped by several men in a black SUV.
Though she desperately called out for help and tried to escape, her kidnappers beat and sexually assaulted her: ‘They started twisting my pinkie, almost breaking it. So I thought resisting more was pointless’.
Upon arriving at a large house with her head in a bag and her hands zip-tied together, she was taken to a windowless room with two cameras – her home for the next four-and-a-half months.
When her captors realised she was from Israel, the Kata’ib Hezbollah terrorists believed she was a spy and refused to believe her despite her insistence that she was hugely supportive of Palestinian rights and critical of the Israeli government.
She refused to confess to the lie of her being a spy, and as a result she was ‘strung up and tortured’.
Elizabeth quickly began making up confessions, she said, which led to her captors allowing her to eat and rest.
But the sexual assault continued, with one man known as the ‘colonel’ groping her and threatening her with rape. She said of him: ‘He was very filthy and very obsessed with sex’.
The terrorists continued to threaten her with more sexual abuse, but didn’t follow through with it, she said.
It took several months for the Israeli government to recognise her as a hostage, and a further few months for the Iraqi government to prove she was alive.
In a video that aired on Iraqi TV in November 2023, she was made to say she worked for the CIA and Israeli intelligence.
But she used coded messages to reveal the cruelty of her treatment.
To indicate she had been electrocuted, she lied and said she lived in the Gan HaHashmal neighbourhood. ‘Hashmal’ is the Hebrew word for electricity.
And she invented names for her supposed handlers, claiming that she worked with a man called ‘Ethan Numia’. ‘Inuim’ is the Hebrew word for torture.
She was eventually freed in early September, with little warning. Driven out of the base while blindfolded, she found herself in a Baghdad garage.
There, an Iraqi official said she was now safe. She was then taken to a home and looked after by female doctors – the first women she had seen for several years.
Israel had reportedly asked America to help get Elizabeth back. Adam Boehler, an American hostage envoy known for his work with the hostages in Gaza, campaigned to get her back.
Mark Savaya, a businessman and friend of Donald Trump, is also said to have played a role in her her release.
A White House spokesperson did not confirm Savaya’s role in the freeing of Elizabeth, instead telling the New York Times that Trump ‘is always concerned about Americans detained abroad’ and that he was ‘willing to leverage our country’s strength and his negotiating skills to intervene in this case’.
Following her release, a spokesperson for Kata’ib Hezbollah did not admit to kidnapping Elizabeth, but claimed in a statement on Telegram that she had made several ‘confessions’ to being a spy and identified the fake ‘Ethan Nuima’ as her handler.
