Ensuring the Israeli Hostages in Gaza Are Not Forgotten
Omer Shem Tov, after surviving 505 days in HAMAS captivity, works to free those who remain.
Last night, JNF UK organised a screening of the new documentary, Home: Omer Shem Tov Speaks, at a north London synagogue. Omer was abducted by HAMAS during the 7 October 2023 pogrom, and finally released after 505 days, on 22 February 2025. After the film, there was a question-and-answer with Omer and the director, Yoram Zak.
Omer, days short of his twenty-first birthday, was at the Nova music festival when he was kidnapped along with his sister, Maya Regev, and his younger brother, Itay. A young man they had met at the concert had driven some to safety then drove back for Omer and his siblings, but their car was stopped by HAMAS. The driver was subsequently murdered in captivity. Both Itay and Maya were shot, and Omer was severely beaten, then forced to the ground in front of a truck; he was sure the terrorists were going to kill him by driving it over his head. Thankfully, that did not happen, and Omer’s siblings were released during the first ceasefire in November 2023. The tortures of HAMAS’s “doctors” left Maya with injuries that multiple surgeries have tried to correct.
After being displayed to a euphoric Gazan crowd, Omer was initially kept with Itay in an above-ground apartment. Once Itay was released, Omer was taken into the tunnels, and placed in a tiny cage with no light—where the darkness was so total there were “no shadows”, as he puts it. (The film is in Hebrew with English subtitles.) Omer immediately had an asthma attack. HAMAS eventually found him an inhaler. The attempts of Omer’s parents to get his inhaler to him through the Red Cross went nowhere as the “humanitarian” organisations have not been allowed access to the Israeli hostages, and have not made it a major part of their public advocacy to try to change this situation.
In the documentary, Zak recreates the image of this confinement such that Omer seems to be telling his story from within the underground cell. Given a torch with enough battery for two or three hours per day, Omer tried to save this meagre light for mealtimes. Initially, Omer was given two pittas per day and some salty water. This was steadily reduced down to half a pitta, and then he was on one biscuit per day and some salty water. He made efforts to protract the process: waiting two or three hours before having half the biscuit, then again for the other half.
To pass the time, Omer tried to sleep as much as possible. A lot of his conscious time was spent talking to God. Omer was not really praying for release: he explains a realisation that people approach Hashem with requests, but nobody ever asks how He is, so Omer chose to start that way, and then offered thanks for being alive, for the food he did have. If Omer did get to asks, it was for strength and guidance, and for his family.
After fifty days, Omer was moved to a slightly bigger cell, with some light and orange walls, again recreated in the film. Omer was allowed to shower for the first time. The dirt on his body was so thick by then it could be scraped off. He was given something like an actual meal and devoured it. The HAMAS terrorists stood by insulting him as a “Jewish pig”. Understandably, he was not bothered at that stage: he had become “very skinny”, his bones visible. An interrogation had been planned for the next day but never took place because the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) had appeared above the tunnel and this distracted his captors.
In this new confinement, where Omer spent the last four-hundred days, there were HAMAS terrorists with him and Omer became something like a servant: washing the dishes, cooking, repairing the electrics, doing the plumbing. In the film, he says this was in part an effort to “connect” with his kidnappers, which Omer tried in other ways, such as latching on to one of the HAMAS operatives mentioning Israeli singer Eden Ben Zaken. However, Omer never lost his sense of the situation—there was no Stockholm syndrome. The concrete thing he was trying to achieve was a modus vivendi: he would make himself useful and the terrorists would avoid excessive cruelty towards him.
Two events demonstrate Omer’s self-awareness in captivity. At one point, when the IDF were heard above the tunnel, Omer conceived an escape plan, and one night even managed to get hold of an AK-47 while the HAMAS terrorists were sleeping: he knew he would have to kill them to have any chance, and was quite prepared to. In the event, he put the weapon down, worried it would jam and he would not be able to kill them all before they could kill him. He was also aware he had no idea where he was or how to get out. At another moment, the HAMAS jihadists misread his cooperativeness and one day said his duties would now include pressing a detonator for the booby-trapped house above them if the IDF entered it. Omer refused and when they told him he would be shot in the head if he did not comply, he told them so be it.
That HAMAS is composed of irredeemable monsters was underlined in the Q&A. Asked if he saw the terrorists as humans, Omer said, “No”, which was quite jarring from such an ebullient and gentle character. But as he went on to describe, every time he thought he had seen a spark of humanity in the terrorists—for example, one of them giving him a bottle of water—they would then “mess it up” by showing him videos of the murders and mutilations by the HAMAS Einsatzgruppen on 7 October.
The filming of the documentary began while Omer was still in captivity: it follows his family in their efforts to secure his release. The moment when this finally happens is emotionally shattering just to watch: seeing Omer on the podium during HAMAS’s disgusting “ceremony”, being made to kiss the head of one of the jihadists, and then reunited with his mum and dad, his siblings, the rest of his family—and his community.
One of the aspects of the film that might be most instructive for non-Israelis is how raw and present the Simchat Torah Pogrom still is for Israelis. They have not forgotten how this war started and the fundamental issue perpetuating it. It is not just the posters of the hostages that line the walls of public spaces and private homes all over the country. Almost everyone has some level of personal connection to somebody who was murdered, raped, or abducted that day. Omer’s whole district in Tel Aviv turned out to welcome him home. His re-entry into the city provides one of the lighter moments that break up the general darkness of the film: the first person to greet him as he opens the car window to thank the crowd is a wonderful Jewish babushka with a box of rice she is throwing over him in handfuls, and after a few more moments he turns to tell his family that somebody had handed him a joint.
In the discussion, one got a glimpse of the personality others had described in the film: funny, loving, magnetic. His family is obviously central to his life—his sister and father were present. He spoke without rancour, and where possible diverted from his personal story to the issue of the hostages. He said plainly he wishes he could have disappeared from public life and just rested after his ordeal, but he feels a responsibility to those Israelis still held by HAMAS. There were other small endearing things. He had disclosed in the documentary interview this tic where, when asked a big question, he would answer, “Wow” (in English), before continuing on, so when he did that on stage it brought a good-natured laugh from the audience.
One of the standout themes was the deepening of Omer’s faith. Raised in a secular household, he had been a believer before all of this, but in format it was a more nebulous spirituality. In the tunnels, he got close to God. On his way out of the tunnels, Eliya Cohen started muttering the Shir Hama’alot and Omer started singing it aloud: Eliya joined in, as did the other hostage with them, Omer Wenkert. Jews surrounded by Islamist killers, singing the Psalms of their ancestors rejoicing in the captives being restored to Zion, is an extraordinary scene to contemplate. Omer has developed on this since regaining his freedom. There is the personal dimension, such as setting his mobile phone aside on Shabbos, and the broader mission he sees as integral to his advocacy for the release of the remaining hostages, of helping unite Jews wherever they are as “one family”. In other words, doing his part to bring to fruition the promise of Jewish peoplehood represented in the restoration of Israel.
Asked about lingering trauma from his captivity, Omer said such effects have been comparatively minimal. The reasons are not necessarily happy ones: he had accepted HAMAS would murder him, and felt calmed by it. He does have trouble sleeping, and he has been left with a negative reaction to airplanes, a result of the experience of being in an above-ground apartment when an Israeli airstrike hit nearby. Omer is far from hostile to the IDF: as mentioned, he was prepared to die rather than collaborate in harming them and he said directly he thinks they are heroes. But it was terrifying to be a hostage in a warzone and he does not believe the hostages can be recovered by military means.
It is relatively clear Omer’s preference is for a rapid end to the war and a deal for all the hostages. His main opposition to prior ceasefire efforts is the phasing of hostage releases. That most of the hostages and their families are more “dovish” should not be a surprise: HAMAS attacked the very people in Israel who are most tenaciously in favour of the peace process that a majority of Israelis see as a failed ideology. Some of the most tragic cases from 7 October are those Israeli activists who realised, only at the end, that the partners for peace they believed they had on the other side made contact only so it would be easier to find and murder them during the HAMAS invasion.
Beyond the contents of the evening, there were two further shadows over the event itself for me. First, the elaborate security measures needed to host it. The location was not given until days beforehand and even now I would not publicly disclose the synagogue. On the night, there were teams of security guards at the gates—and there were multiple layers of metal gates to get to the synagogue. Lists of attendees had to be carefully checked and we were told to bring identification with us. Second, as best I could tell, I was one of the very few non-Jews in the audience. It is difficult to be sure, of course, but I would be shocked if the percentage of non-Jews in attendance reached double digits, something I have found at all previous events advocating for the hostages.
In London, the travails of minority groups generally attract wide sympathy and advocacy events become stages for demonstrations of solidarity from the city in all its vaunted diversity. Not for Jews, though. Events where all that is being asked is the remembrance of murdered Jewish innocents and assistance in recovering those in bondage while there is still time to save them are not only neglected by those who advocate for everyone else—I have never seen a representative of the “human rights” groups at a hostages event—but have to be held semi-covertly because of the very real threat that such a gathering would itself become the target of violence.