Family of Released Hostage Reveals Harrowing Details of His Captivity

A military helicopter with released hostage Omer Shem Tov arrives at Rabin Medical Center in Petah Tikva, February 22, 2025. (Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90) (Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

He had to ration himself, eating at first two pitas a day, then one, then a half, then just a cookie, because he didn’t know how long he’d be there.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Starved of food and companionship, Omer Shem Tov used his faith and emotional strength to survive Hamas captivity, his parents told Channel 13 in an interview Monday.

Omer was kidnapped from the Nova dance festival during Hamas’s October 7, 2023, invasion, along with two friends, Maya and Itay Regev.

They remained together until the brother and sister were released in the first hostage deal, which occurred in late November that year.

He didn’t see another friendly face for the next 13 months, and for a whopping 50 days, he was in complete isolation, his parents, Shelly and Malki, said.

The terrorists put him in a very deep tunnel that was pitch dark and so low he couldn’t stand up, and so narrow he couldn’t stretch his arms out, they said.

“They gave him a flashlight and a just a tiny bit of food and sea water, and left him there,” Malki said.

He had to ration himself, eating at first two pitas a day, then one, then a half, then just a cookie, because he didn’t know how long he’d be there.

“Mom, I was so thin I could feel my bones,” Shelly recounted him telling her.

Then the battery in the flashlight died, and for five days, he was “in total, utter darkness,” Malki said.

“On the fifth day, he spoke to God,” Shelly said, “praying, ‘Please, God, get me out of here, it doesn’t matter to where,’ and he said that two hours later his captor came.”

The Hamas terrorists took him to a wider tunnel, one tiled with white tiles, which seemed like real light to him.

“Even in hell there seem to be degrees of hell,” his father remarked with a small chuckle.

The Shem Tovs spoke about Omer’s faith and how it helped him.

Once, when he saw a terrorist using his prayer beads, they said, “Omer told him, ‘Come, I’ll teach you something else: ‘God was, is, and will always be king,’” a common line in Jewish prayer, said especially on the holidays.

His captors also gave him a book on the weekly Torah readings that a Jewish soldier had left behind, “which he’d like to return” now, the Shem Tovs said with a smile, as the man’s name was written on it.

“He also received Psalm 100,” Shelly said, “which I would read all the time here… and he read this psalm in captivity every day.”

“It’s unbelievable,” she said, marveling at the coincidence.

Omer also told his parents that he never showed fear to his captors, knowing that if he did, “they would take advantage of it.”

This included when IDF tanks rumbled right over his tunnel, shaking the ground, and he could even hear soldiers speaking in Hebrew – and his captors told him, his parents said, that if they got too close or attempted a rescue, “they would shoot him in the head.”

Shelly, who sat by Omer’s bedside the entire first night that he returned, not sleeping and just holding his hand and watching him breathe, said that the word “joy” has a different meaning for her now.

Instead of “waking up in fear every morning… it’s opening your eyes and saying, ‘Wow. Wow,’” she recounted with a huge smile and sparkling eyes.

Seeing him for the first time in 505 days and hugging him fiercely “was really like giving birth to my child again,” she said.