Evyatar David was just 22 when Hamas terrorists abducted him from the Nova music festival during the October 7, 2023 massacre, taking him into Gaza alongside his childhood best friend Guy Gilboa-Dalal.
His captors starved them throughout captivity, with the deprivation becoming so severe in his final months that they sometimes avoided speaking simply to conserve energy.
In the summer of 2025, an emaciated Evyatar was forced to appear in a Hamas propaganda video, list the days he had gone without food, and dig a pit inside a tunnel that his captors told him would be his grave.
“I could barely move. Could barely do anything,” he later recalled; he said even holding the shovel was almost impossible.
After 737 days as a hostage, Evyatar was finally released alive on October 13, 2025, reunited with his family and Guy, and later returned home to Kfar Saba.
A year later, he says the captivity is still with him: flashbacks can strike without warning, and nightmares wake him at night.