JERUSALEM (VINnews) — The first and last mistake of the Hamas captors of Maksim Harkin – was to believe him. For two and a half years of harsh captivity underground in the Gaza Strip, he conducted a nerve-wracking mind game in which every wrong word meant possible death. They saw him as just another civilian abducted from Israeli territory; they did not know that beneath the civilian clothing was an IDF officer, the only one left alive from the group of prisoners who were held with him.

Now, as he marks his 38th birthday, Harkin reveals for the first time what took place in the darkness,  the moments of heavy pressure that led him to declare his conversion to Islam, the staged videos in which he was forced to participate, the secret journal he buried in the soil of Gaza, and the surprising spiritual turning point that led him to undergo a complicated circumcision procedure precisely after his release.

The moment of kidnapping in the fields between Kibbutz Be’eri and Re’im was the turning point in which his survival strategy was decided. Seconds before the terrorists bound his hands, Harkin made a quick decision: he took out his phone and his public and military documents, and threw them into the bushes. He knew very well that revealing he was an IDF officer would turn him into a strategic asset, but would also immediately endanger his life. “Did you think that if they discovered you are an officer your fate would be worse?” he was asked in the special interview at the Kan Broadcasting Corporation, and he answered firmly: “What do you mean worse? I would have survived maybe a few hours.”

The passage into the darkness of the tunnels was sharp and violent. “The terrorists also came from open areas,” he recalls the dramatic moment of capture, “you hear screams and prayers of people and crying and death… and shooting… you understand you are next in line. The first bullet missed them, passed by my ear, and then I collapsed and asked G-d… I asked Him to help my family raise my children, it’s a pity I won’t see how they grow up.”

He was taken into the depths of the earth, 30 meters underground, completely cut off from daylight, trapped inside a tight concrete box. The harsh physical conditions were accompanied by a strict regime of isolation and enforced silence. With him in the cell were additional hostages, including Segev Kalfon, but they were forbidden to make any eye contact or speak. “Three months after we were kidnapped they did not let us talk,” says Kalfon, his fellow captive. “Once we spoke… they beat us. They put a mask on my head for three days.”

To survive in the darkest moments, the two developed a small fantasy, an anchor of sanity that kept them alive: “We would sit and always say: Max, if we get out alive, the first thing we do – we tell the Red Cross to stop at a Yellow gas station, we buy an instant coffee and sit with a cigarette, looking at the sky. That was our dream.”

In total isolation, mental and religious pressure from the captors began to form. Talk about Islam became frequent, and Harkin understood that for him, surrendering to the religious “game” was the only means of reducing hostility and preserving his life. “Talk about religion… it’s the only way to somehow connect with them and maybe get a bit more information and understanding,” he explains.

The forced conversion process in captivity was defined by him as a tactical and calculated move. The captors allowed him to shower – a rare and valuable commodity in the tunnels – and provided him clean clothes for the ceremony. “They do a ceremony where you raise a finger, say some ‘verses’ in Arabic… you say it three times I think, and that’s it, like you are Muslim. And from here you are supposed to meet requirements and conditions.”

The main requirement was full participation in the five daily prayers, kneeling alongside his captors on the mat. But while his mouth recited the Arabic verses, his thoughts were elsewhere entirely. “In prayer you stand, say what you need to say, like without putting real meaning into it. And what do you think? You are talking to G-d, just there in captivity.”

The conversion opened a small window of trust from the captor commander, nicknamed “the Joker.” Near his birthday, the captor gave him a simple notebook so he could write Qur’an verses. Harkin used this gift to lead a double life under Hamas’ nose. In the main section he copied the religious verses as required, but the last part of the notebook became a secret personal diary, where he hid letters to his mother and future interactions with his young daughter. “I turned it into a diary, a book no one will read… and I mark for myself a space where I can keep a secret… this is how I remind myself I am still alive, that I am a father and a son.”

This diary, which contained the most authentic testimony of his life in captivity, never left the Gaza Strip. Knowing clearly that the militants would conduct a thorough search before release, Harkin made the painful decision to bury the notebook deep in the ground, under the concrete slab in the house where he was held, moments before being forced to leave.

A significant part of the abuse he endured was devoted to exploiting him for psychological warfare purposes. Harkin, classified by his captors as “Prisoner No. 24,” was forced to participate in propaganda videos produced under carefully staged and highly controlled conditions. In these videos, Hamas producers tried to make him appear severely wounded as a result of IDF airstrikes.

“The production starts with bandages, maybe iodine, tomato paste and sand,” he describes behind the scenes of the Gaza videos, “I have no medicine, they smear it on you, they make you look like a real wounded person in their opinion, and they start filming.” Even in these moments, Harkin tried to use tone of voice and subtle body language to signal to his family that the video was forced and staged.

The physical and mental abuse peaked when the captors decided to use him to send direct messages to Israeli decision-makers. During captivity, they filmed a video in which they beat him severely, and sent the footage directly to the mobile phone of one of the government ministers. “Once they filmed how they beat me and sent it to one of our ministers in the government… ‘eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth,’ it was a message to Itamar Ben Gvir.”

After two and a half years of determined survival in the darkness, Maksim Harkin was released and returned to the arms of his mother Talia and his daughter Monica. But returning home was not the end of the journey, but the beginning of a long process of rebuilding his erased identity. He began writing down the memories he had buried in Gaza, in order to produce a book reconstructing the lost diary.

Harkin, born in Ukraine to a Jewish mother and a Christian father, was not circumcised in childhood. Precisely the experience of forced conversion and prolonged captivity under Hamas awakened in him a deep inner drive to complete his Jewish identity. During a trip to Russia, where he met the Chabad community and Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar, he made the decision to undergo circumcision at the age of 38.

“For me it is closing a circle, completing what was missing,” he explains emotionally, “G-d gave me a chance to live again, I need to give at least the respect I can and be whole with myself. And I went and did it and I enjoy it and do not regret it for a moment.”

As part of the ceremony, he was given the official Jewish name: Maksim Zalman Zelig Harkin, after his mother’s Jewish ancestors.

Despite the horrors he experienced, the frequent flashbacks and constant comparisons to life outside the tunnels, Harkin refuses to let feelings of revenge govern his new life. “There is no revenge in me. Because if there is revenge in me, then how am I better than them? There is none. But I believe G-d makes an accounting for everyone, everyone will receive exactly what they deserve. Today as a father and a brother, the most important thing for me is that my children become good people. Good in character, in soul, in heart… good will always defeat evil, always.”