This post was written as a guest post for my good friend Alex Stein’s great substack “Love of the Land.” Since it was originally posted in late August, the war has been brought to a close, and 20 living hostages have been returned. May we see better days, Shana Tova.
Evyatar David didn’t make the world stop turning.
On Friday, August 1st, the 7th of Av 5785, Hamas released a video of the 24-year-old from Kfar Saba who was taken hostage at the Nova festival on October 7, 2023. In the clip, he stands in a dark tunnel, reduced to skin and bones, digging what he says is his own grave and begging to be returned home. It was a horrifying image taken from the collective historical trauma of the Jews, and one that would have been almost unthinkable two years earlier.
I watched the video the day it was released, during a month-long visit to Israel, my first time back since I left with my wife and two daughters almost exactly three years earlier. More importantly, it was our first time back since October 7th.
I watched the video of Evyatar David, and then I went to the pool. Hours later, I sat down to Friday night dinner like everybody else.
You can get used to almost anything in life, but I remember what it was like when Gilad Shalit was held in captivity from 2006 to 2011. He was just one soldier, a tankist taken by Hamas from inside Israel while on active duty. I remember how all-consuming the Gilad Shalit saga seemed; the chairs left outside cafes (“for Gilad Shalit – until you return”), the weddings where rabbis issued a prayer for his return during the chuppah before the glass was crushed, the iconic blue and white bumper stickers for “ha yeled shel kulanu.”
On October 7th, Hamas kidnapped 251 people from Israel, including more than 50 Thai nationals and dozens of people with foreign nationalities. After multiple rounds of hostage release deals, three IDF rescue operations (that saved a total of eight hostages), and almost two years of war, about 54 hostages remain in Gaza. Of these, maybe 20 are believed to be still alive.
Read the rest of the blog post on Love of the Land, here.