Ziva is scripted as someone who "has had to do awful things and watch awful things in her life"; she has "seen 12-year-old suicide bombers in Israel" and gone hungry long enough to resort to eating maggots. In the third season, she recounts an incident in which one of her friends from Mossad had been beheaded after infiltrating a Hamas cell in Ramallah; Hamas terrorists sent his head back on the overnight express, leading her to view captivity as worse than death. Ducky later told Gibbs that, "Agent David has been through things you and I can't even imagine" and suggested that she was the only one who could relate to a suspect who had been abused.