The worst pain for the hostage families is not knowing. To the 58 pairs of mothers and fathers who crossed into the 600-day threshold of this nightmare last month, the flickers of hope feel fewer and farther between. “Time is running out,” survivor Yocheved Lifshitz said emotionally. Others, looking at pictures of the dozens still in captivity — more than half of whom are almost certainly dead — can’t begin to comprehend the hell they’ve endured. “It’s hard to imagine what they and their families are going through after 600 days,” Jake Teper shook his head. But in these dark nights of the soul, there’s a common theme among the fortunate ones: God never left.
Sapir Cohen, 30
Like so many of the kidnapped, Sapir’s story is one of endurance. When Hamas terrorists burst through the door of her kibbutz, life as she knew it was over. “They [went] home by home, shooting everywhere. And we just wait [for] our time.” Hiding under the bed, she and her boyfriend, Sasha, heard men in black masks finally crash through the entryway. “They took everything,” she remembers, “… and then I heard Sasha scream.” Kidnapped and thrown on a motorcycle, she arrived in Gaza to angry, bloodthirsty mobs. “They beat me so strong that I put [my] hands on my head, and I was like, ‘Please save me. I don’t want to die here.’”
They didn’t kill her, but for 55 days, she existed in underground tunnels, the bleakest surroundings she could have imagined. “It’s really bad. You can’t know if it’s day or night — and you can’t breathe. It’s very hard to breathe.” But it was there, Sapir knows, that she had a spiritual revelation. “I felt miracles,” she says quietly. “I think that one of the biggest miracles that I felt was maybe I’m supposed to be in this place.”
Sapir was held with a terrified 16-year-old girl, who she made it her mission to care for. “And from that moment, when I decided to take this responsibility, I felt so powerful.” She started thanking God for sending her to Gaza. “I know how to use [the strength You gave me] to keep myself and this girl,” she would pray, adding her gratitude for “all the angels you sent me [in] this hell.”
In the dark, she would repeat a prayer, and somewhere deep inside, “I felt peace. And I didn’t understand. How can I feel it in this situation?” She didn’t grow up as a person of faith, but she knows now: she found it in the darkness of the tunnels.
Keith Siegel, 65
Everyone responds differently to captivity. To Keith Siegel, survival meant keeping his mind sharp. “He found his strategy to keep anchored: what number day it was, who he was with, and repeat it and repeat it,” his brother told reporters when he was released. Unlike the other hostages, the American never spent long in one place. By his count, he moved around a total of 33 times during his 482 days in the terrorists’ hands.
He found peace in the quiet moments. “I started saying blessings before meals, ‘Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.’ After every meal, I also recited blessings. I didn’t remember all of them, but I saw someone on TV saying, ‘Bor’e Minei Mezonot,’ so I started using that,” Siegel remembered. “I remember saying ‘Shema Yisrael’ twice a day and adding ‘Baruch Shem Kevod Malchuto Le’olam Va’ed Amen.’ The first thing I wanted to do when I returned was kiddush, to bless ‘Hamotzi.’ In Gaza, there’s no alcohol and no grape juice for Kiddush.”
After his wife was released, he realized, grimly, that he might spend months — maybe years — in Hamas’s grip. But “even in the tunnels,” he reflects quietly, “I found ways to feel His presence.” When he was finally reunited with his family, “his daughter asked what he wanted for their first Shabbat meal together,” CBN recounts. “His answer surprised her: ‘You know what I want most of all? A kippah and a Kiddush cup.’”
Eli Sharabi, 52
“I’m not a religious person,” Eli Sharabi tells people now, “but from the first day I was kidnapped, every morning, I said ‘Shema Yisrael,’ which I had never said in my life. The power of faith is insane. There’s something watching over you.”
For 491 days, Eli was trapped in Gaza, not knowing that his wife and two teenage daughters had been killed. When the gunman found the safe room where he and his family were hiding, he offered to give himself up without a fight if they would leave the women alone. “I will be back,” he promised. But they would not be. More than a year and a half later, he learned that his bargain had not spared them. Lianne, Noiva, Yahel, and even their dog, Mocha, had all been executed. “I’m glad I didn’t know they were dead,” he has said. “Because thinking I would return to them is what kept me going.”
Gaunt and in shackles, he repeated those sacred words of Deuteronomy — words he had never uttered — “Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.” At home, his brother would make Kiddush every Friday night, singing a song of blessing. Miles away, when Eli would “whisper his Friday-night prayers in his underground prison, it was not around a fancy table adorned with gleaming silver and fine linens,” Rabbi Areyah Kaltmann pointed out. “But in God’s eyes, his humble Shabbat prayers were holier than the loftiest feast.”
The power of faith, Eli insists now, “is incredible.” Through unspeakable suffering, pain, and now loss, “it was faith that kept us alive.”
Agam Berger, 20
She knows exactly how long they held her: 700,000 minutes. “When Hamas overran the Nahal Oz base on Oct. 7, 2023, many of my friends were murdered,” she has written in the weeks since. “In those harrowing moments, as I was being kidnapped, I had the freedom to choose what to say. I recited, continuously, the same verse that Jews on the threshold of death have said for millennia: Shema Yisrael, ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.’”
For 482 days, she clung to the traditions that felt like home, refusing to violate the Shabbat, even when Hamas threatened them. “We held symbolic Shabbat ceremonies, sometimes with makeshift candles used for life.”
There were times, Agam remembers, that they could hear the radio or see a calendar and “follow the Jewish holidays.” She fasted on Yom Kippur, Tisha B’Av, and the Fast of Esther — “even when I didn’t know when the next meal would come.” “We missed both Hanukkah holidays, but we celebrated Passover…”
At one point, she boldly asked for a Jewish prayer book — a request that one captor laughed at. But two days later, a terrorist returned with one that had probably been left behind by an IDF soldier. “Your God loves you,” she was told.
“We used it throughout our captivity,” Agam reflects.
It was in those days that she learned, “as my forebears did, that imprisonment can’t overwhelm the inner spiritual life. Our faith and covenant with God, the story we remember on Passover, is more powerful than any cruel captor. Even as Hamas tried to coerce me into converting to Islam — at times, forcing a hijab on my head — they couldn’t take away my soul. … I knew I had been chosen by God for something, and that he would protect me.”
Leaving Gaza for the last time on January 30, Agam wrote in Hebrew the saying “that stayed with me for my entire captivity: ‘I chose the path of faith and with the path of faith I have returned.’”
Omer Shem Tov, 22
“May the Lord answer you when you are in distress; may the name of the God of Jacob protect you.” So starts the beginning of Psalm 20 — the same psalm that Shelly Shem Tov would recite every morning in her son’s empty bedroom. Little did she know that miles away in a dark tunnel, her son Omer was meditating on the same words. For days, he had uttered these same verses 130 feet underground, alone.
The New York Times’s Isabel Kershner sat down with Shelly, astonished by what could not be a coincidence. It wasn’t because the family was deeply religious. As the Shem Tovs both admitted, they were largely secular until Omer was snatched by Hamas from the Nova music festival. “A few days into his captivity,” he told Kershner, “he began to speak to God. He made vows. He began to bless whatever food he was given. And he had requests [of God] — some of which he believes were answered.”
“You are looking for something to lean on, to hold onto,” he explained in a recent interview near Tel Aviv. “The first place I went to was God. I would feel a power enter me,” he said. “Faith kept me going,” he insisted. “I always believed I would get home, though I didn’t know how or when.”
For 505 days, Omer tried to “keep kosher.” As he told Kershner, “He promised God that if he got home, he would pray daily with ‘tefillin’ — the small leather boxes containing scriptures that worshipers tie onto their heads and one of their arms for morning prayers.” Like so many others, he tried to survive day by day. Those times when he heard Israeli forces above him had to be the hardest.
“After the November 2023 cease-fire collapsed, Mr. Shem Tov was taken back down into the tunnels and spent the rest of his captivity alone, save for the gunmen who would look in on him. … For 50 days, he sat in a small, stifling cell with hardly any food — as little as one biscuit a day and a few drops of salty water. It was pitch dark most of the time. An asthma sufferer, he could barely breathe. His captors brought him an inhaler. One day, at breaking point, he begged God to take him somewhere — anywhere — else. Ten minutes later, he said, the captors came and moved him to a larger underground chamber with white tiled walls and electricity. ‘It was paradise’ by comparison, he said.”
At one point, his guards brought him materials left behind from the IDF soldiers, hoping he could decode them if they included military strategies. In what can only be described as surreal, “[a]mong the materials, which the captors allowed him to keep, was a card printed with Psalm 20.”
Noa Beer, 30
Noa Beer didn’t linger in the dark tunnels. She’s captive to the horrors she can’t shake. In an emotional interview with The Christian Post, she admitted that she didn’t believe in God “until she found herself surrounded by Hamas terrorists at the Nova Music Festival on October 7, 2023.” Despite a constant spray of bullets whizzing by, not one hit her. “One of the things that people need to understand is that this was a massacre,” she explained somberly. “[Hamas] came there with only one purpose: They came to kill, and they did not care how or who.”
In the moments before the screaming, she remembers looking around at the people of all ages “dancing together in harmony.” Suddenly, the noises of gunfire sent people ducking and running for cover. “Red alert,” she screamed into the crowd. “I could feel the ground shaking from the missiles. It was terrifying, but at the time, all we knew was that there were missiles in the sky, and we needed to lie down on the ground.”
Climbing into a car, Noa thought she could get away. She remembers some people stopping in bomb shelters along the way, which ended up being a death sentence, as Hamas picked off the people at each shelter. “I don’t know what came over me, but I had a very bad gut feeling, and I didn’t want to go into a shelter. That ended up saving our lives.”
Having served as a medic in the Israeli military, she’d stopped to get out of the car and help someone when a bullet flew “right next to me.” “Then another one and another one. I raised my eyes, and I saw there was a terrorist about 20 meters in front of us, just shooting at us like crazy.” Noa remembers the huge smile on his face as he mowed terrified people down. “And I’m thinking to myself, how evil can a person be? I have nothing to defend myself with. You’re enjoying yourself, you’re laughing,” she said.
Desperate to get out of the area, she hit the accelerator. “I truly, to this day, can say that there was an angel guarding me, because the bullets had hit everything around me except me.” She drove to a hospital with some of the wounded concertgoers in her backseat. “They were looking straight at me and shooting straight at me, and they missed,” she said, shaking her head. “So if there isn’t a God, then it’s something else, but I’m guessing it’s a God.”
AUTHOR
Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.
EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.
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