By Meg Foley Yoder
Omer Shem Tov spent more than a year as a hostage in Gaza, starved, beaten and cut off from the world. On Monday night at Harvard’s JFK Jr. Forum, he offered a moving account of captivity, moral defiance, and the stubborn insistence on gratitude.
The standing ovation came before Omer Shem Tov had said a word.
At the JFK Jr. Forum, where discussions typically center on policy and power, Ned Price, moderator and Interim Co-Director of the Institute of Politics, made clear that this conversation would be different. “Tonight, I’ll focus my questions on your experience,” he told Shem Tov, the guest of an event titled “505 Days in Hamas Captivity: A Story of Survival in Gaza,” cosponsored by the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights as part of its Israel/Palestine in 2026 series and the Institute of Politics. The subject was not borders or cease-fires, but rather what it meant, for one young man, to be held hostage underground for 505 days.
Shem Tov began by describing a life that now feels distant. Before October 7, he said, he was a “regular kid,” a 20-year-old Israeli newly finished with mandatory army service, waiting tables, saving for a post-service trip to South America, and harboring a dream of becoming a D.J. “I dreamed of just playing music to some audience,” he said. “It’s weird, because today I cannot really remember my life before the seventh (of October).”
On Oct. 6, he went with friends to the Nova music festival. “It was so much fun,” he recalled. “I think it’s one of the best parties that I’ve ever been in.” At 6:29 a.m. on Oct. 7th, sirens cut the music. At first, he and his friends reacted with practiced calm, he said; rocket alerts were not uncommon. But the phone calls from his father grew urgent. “Omer, this is not only missile attack,” his father told him. “There are terrorists invading Israel.”
“Until this day, I can still hear those whistles of the bullets going next to my head.” –Omer Shem Tov
Soon, Shem Tov described, he was running across an open field with hundreds of people, gunshots cracking from every direction. He spoke of bodies in a bush where he tried to hide, of the discipline required to keep moving while people dropped around him. Ori Danino, a friend of a friend whom he had met only hours earlier, drove back into danger to try to rescue Shem Tov and two friends, siblings Maya and Itay Regev. Their car was ambushed. “Until this day, I can still hear those whistles of the bullets going next to my head,” Shem Tov said.
For the forum audience, Shem Tov played a chilling recording captured from the car. In it, Maya, speaking in Hebrew to her father from the back seat, screamed: “Dad, he shot me! … I love you. I am sorry.” Ori Danino fled, survived for hours, and was later captured. After 11 months in captivity, Danino was killed. Shem Tov was dragged from the car, beaten, bound, and thrown into a pickup truck. Minutes later and now in Gaza, he saw “men and women, children and elders” celebrating. “I saw the pure joy in their eyes,” he said, believing the crowd understood exactly the atrocities that had been carried out across the border.
The early weeks of captivity were a blur of movement, he said: apartments, night transfers, hunger. Then, after 53 days, the two captives held with him were released in a deal, and he was taken alone into the tunnels. The first, he said, lay about 120 feet underground. His cell was so small he could not stand upright. The darkness was total. “It becomes pitch black. So dark,” he said. He spent 50 days there, rationed from a piece of bread a day to half a piece, then a quarter, and finally to a single biscuit and a few sips of salty water. “It’s not the case,” he said, that his captors had nothing to give. “I saw them passing by with bags of flour and rice and even meat and fish.”
Price asked whether there were moments of humanity. Shem Tov said the easy answer was no, and the longer answer did not soften it. In a larger tunnel later, he tried to survive by making himself useful. He approached the tunnel’s leader and offered compliance. “I’ll do anything,” he told him, “I’ll cook and clean and do whatever you want me to do. Just let’s try and stay on good terms.” It worked only in the narrow sense that he stayed alive. “Very quickly it came to a certain point where I became their slave,” he said, describing digging for hours, hauling weapons and explosives, and carrying hundreds of U.N.-stamped aid boxes meant for civilian Palestinians that, he said, were diverted to Hamas fighters underground.
He also described a moment of moral resistance that brought him close to death. After being forced to help wire explosives, a captor showed him a detonator and told him that when Israeli soldiers entered the booby-trapped house, Omer would be the one to press the button. Shem Tov refused. The guard threatened to shoot him. “Okay. So, shoot me,” Shem Tov said he replied, refusing to become an instrument of destruction even if it meant his own survival.
On the question of connection to the outside world, he told the audience that for most of his captivity he knew only that a war was underway. In the last five months as a hostage, his captors brought a television into the tunnel, tuned to Al Jazeera. He was not allowed to watch, except for five minutes on Saturday evenings, when Israeli citizens gathered weekly in televised rallies for the hostages. The permission was not a kindness, he said, but cruelty. “They did it because they wanted to abuse me mentally.” The captors, he said, told him his family did not care, that “the army want to kill you,” that “the government don’t want to bring you back home.”
He did not pretend those messages left him untouched. When an audience member asked whether he was angry at the Israeli government for not securing his release sooner, he acknowledged that he had been. “I can tell you that I was angry at the government while I was there, and I am still angry at the government today,” he said. Yet he framed that anger as something he is trying to move beyond. “Why would I waste time on this bad energy right now?” he said. “I wish for a better future for Israel, maybe a better government for Israel.” He repeated that he is “very apolitical” and said he is trying “to avoid any bad energy, trying to avoid anger.”
“Why would I waste time on this bad energy right now?” he said. “I wish for a better future for Israel, maybe a better government for Israel.”
His perceptions of his captors, by contrast, remained unambiguous. He spoke not only of Hamas fighters, but of what he said he witnessed among civilians on the day he was taken. Before Oct. 7, he said, he had been raised on the idea of peace. “In school in Israel, they raised us on peace,” he said. Even Israel’s national symbols, he noted, include a dove and an olive branch. And yet what he says he saw in Gaza unsettled that education. “I am sure there are some who wish for peace, but I can say that the majority of them … they want to eliminate us.” He emphasized that, “For peace, we need both sides.”
There were, amid the brutality, moments of connection, not with captors, but with home. Near the end, he said, a fighter returned with Hebrew books left behind after an encounter with IDF soldiers. Inside was a small card with Psalm 20, a prayer for protection. He was allowed to keep it. He read it daily in the tunnel. Only later did he learn that his mother, at home, had chosen the same psalm to recite daily in his room. “We were connected,” he said.
After his release, he told the audience, he moved quickly into advocacy, flying to Washington just nine days later to press the Trump administration for assistance in returning the remaining hostages. Now, he said, that mission has eased, and he is trying to return to a life and a future defined less by survival than by gratitude. He spoke of the simple act of waking each morning, of opening his eyes, taking a breath, standing on his feet and seeing the sun. “Wake up in the morning, say thank you,” he said. “Be grateful; it’s all a miracle.”
Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights
