Avinatan Or was held alone for all 738 days of his captivity, underground, in the dark. At some point, feeling his way around his cell, he found a wall of sandbags and noticed something that should not have been there: moving air. "That doesn't happen in a tunnel," he told Channel 12's Uvda in an interview that aired Monday.
So he started to dig.
Or, who was abducted from the Nova festival on October 7, 2023, together with his partner at the time, Noa Argamani, worked at the wall for about six months. He hid from the security camera behind a garbage bag and used a 60-meter extension cable as a digging tool. In the launch video for his new book he said he dug more than ten meters out with his hands. The army, he explained, had taught him that no defense is ever perfect and that there is always a weak point.
He prepared for the day he would get through. He packed a bag with clothes he had found. He took a sack and marked it with the word "hostage," so that Israeli soldiers would know who he was. He wrote a will, and letters to his mother and father in case he was killed on the way out.
One day, digging, he struck the root of a tree. He smelled it, he told the Jewish Federations of North America last November, and it felt like breathing in life in a place of death.
Then he broke through. "One night I got out, I saw the stars in the sky," he said in that speech. He decided to go back into the cell and make his run on another night. Before he could, his captors found out.
