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. Hiding under the bed, she and her boyfriend, Sasha, heard men in black masks finally crash through the entryway. 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.
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. After his wife was released, he realized, grimly, that he might spend months—maybe years—in Hamas’ grip. But “even in the tunnels,” he reflects quietly, “I found ways to feel His presence.”
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.”
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.”
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.'”
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.”
These are just a few of the accounts of Hamas terror survivors finding God even in the darkest of tunnels. God is good and He does not abandon us. We must continue to pray for the remaining hostages and their families and that there would finally be peace in Gaza, Israel and the entire Middle East.