This Friday night, Jews around the world will gather to welcome a new year on Rosh Hashanah. For me, every Jewish holiday now carries the memory of another one: Simchat Torah, Oct. 7, 2023, when I was 20 years old, dancing with my friends at the Nova music festival and dreaming of becoming a musician and DJ. At 6:29 that morning, the music stopped. My father began calling insistently. “Omer, this is not only a missile attack,” he told me. “There are terrorists invading Israel.”
We tried to escape the festival, but terrorists ambushed our car. Hamas bound my hands and threw me into a truck, and that was the start of my next 505 days as a hostage in Gaza. I was starved, beaten, abused, and humiliated. I lost 25 kilos while they held me in a tunnel 40 meters underground, and I frequently watched the terrorists eating from stolen humanitarian aid while they gave us barely enough to survive.
