Three years after the images that shocked the world, Avinatan Or reveals what happened after he was taken to Gaza
For three years, the world knew Avinatan Or through a few seconds of horrifying footage.
His girlfriend, Noa Argamani, was being forced onto a motorcycle and driven toward Gaza, her arms reaching desperately toward him as she cried, “Don’t kill me.”
Or was only yards away, surrounded by armed men and being marched in the opposite direction.
Now, three years after the October 7 attack, Or has described what happened after those cameras stopped recording: the beating that followed, his journey into Gaza, 738 days spent underground in isolation, and a painstaking escape attempt in which he secretly dug a tunnel toward the surface.
His account appears in his new memoir, Through the Earth, which was published in Israel in September 2026 and quickly reached the top of Israel Hayom’s nonfiction bestseller list.
The book gives a detailed account of how Or tried to preserve both his body and his mind while being held underground, and how he eventually decided that waiting for freedom was no longer enough.
The moment the world saw them being torn apart
On the morning of October 7, 2023, Or and Argamani were among those fleeing the Nova music festival in southern Israel as the attack unfolded.
“We drove out from the festival area and we tried to get to the main road,” Or recalled.
Gunmen began shooting at them.
“They started shooting at us, and then we turned around and drove into the field. And we found this place and we hid inside this ditch.”
For roughly two hours, the couple remained hidden.
They barely spoke.
Or remembers being struck by how calmly Argamani handled the situation.
“Actually, we didn’t speak,” he said. “While we were in the car, I thought—I don’t know—I’m proud of her because she did very, very well. She didn’t get stressed and she kept very cool.”
He told her: “Nice job, and I’m very proud of you.”
Then they waited in silence, communicating largely through their eyes.
At around 10.30am, that silence was broken by footsteps and Arabic voices.
“I heard one guy come to us,” Or said. “I heard the steps. And then we knew we would be found. When he saw us he shouted: ‘There are Jews here.’”
Argamani screamed.
Or immediately tried to reach her, but the couple were surrounded.
“I turned around and I tried to just get to her—I tried to help her to escape,” he recalled. “Many were surrounding us. They started to take us into Gaza.”
The couple were forced to walk for approximately 15 minutes toward the border. Or kept looking toward the sky, hoping to see an aircraft, and toward the ground, searching for any indication that Israeli forces were nearby.
There was nothing.
When they were perhaps 100 or 200 metres from the border, a motorcycle arrived.
Argamani was taken away.
The footage that would become one of the most recognizable images of October 7 begins at that moment. Argamani is forced onto the motorcycle, reaching back toward Or as he is held by another group of men.
The video was among the first widely circulated recordings of the attack and was later independently reported and verified by several news organizations.
Or says the scene looked different from his perspective.
“In that situation, I know that there’s nothing I can do because I’m surrounded by maybe 25 people,” he said. “In the video, you can see four or five of them.”
He understood that resisting could cost him his life.
“We were surrounded, and I understood that screaming and starting to fight was not an option because it would be the end.”
What tormented him most was the feeling that he had failed to protect Argamani.
“It was my job to protect her,” he remembered thinking, “and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.”
Then the motorcycle disappeared toward Gaza.
The beating that followed the kidnapping
What happened next was never captured by the famous footage.
Or says that after Argamani was taken away, a group of men attacked him.
“And just after they took her, they started to lynch me. There were maybe 10 or 15 people who started to lynch me.”
As he was being marched away, one man struck him from behind with a large wooden plank.
“As I walked, one of them came behind me with a plank, a big wooden plank, and smashed it into my head.”
Blood covered his face and shirt.
Then, he said, the men began punching and kicking him.
The assault only stopped when an armed Hamas terrorist fired into the air, causing the attackers to scatter.
Or was placed on another motorcycle and taken across the border.
Within hours, he was underground.
Argamani was gone.
“The next time I saw her,” Or said, “I was in the hospital 738 days later.”
The length of his captivity has been independently confirmed. Or was released on October 13, 2025, after 738 days in captivity.
The lie he believed for months
For much of his captivity, Or had almost no reliable information about what was happening outside.
One question, however, remained constant.
“Since the first day, I asked if they knew about Noa,” he said. “I said: ‘You kidnapped my girlfriend. Can you tell me anything about her?’”
Weeks later, one of his captors gave him an answer.
“One of them told me: ‘Noa is home.’”
Or believed him.
“And since that day,” he said, “for me, she was released.”
She had not been released.
Argamani remained in Gaza until June 8, 2024, when Israeli forces rescued her along with Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov and Shlomi Ziv during Operation Arnon. The operation took place in Nuseirat; Yamam officer Arnon Zmora was killed during the rescue.
Or, meanwhile, remained underground.
He would not see Argamani again for another 738 days.
738 days beneath Gaza
Most of Or’s captivity was spent alone, underground, without sunlight, fresh air or a normal bathroom.
At 6ft 4in, he was too tall for the low tunnels to allow him to stand upright.
His spine remained curved for much of that time.
“I couldn’t stretch my body,” he said.
He tried to exercise despite his condition.
“I tried to work out inside the tunnel. Even though I was very hungry and very tired” — he was given a small amount of food every four days, which he had to ration himself — “and desperate, I knew this was a good thing I should do. I kept going, and slowly it helped me in the long term.”
The physical deprivation was only part of the struggle.
Or believed that if his captors could take control of his thoughts, they would have taken something even more important than his freedom.
“They took everything from me. But I struggled to keep my mind clear. Even though they took my physical freedom, I struggled so that they would not take my mental freedom.”
He began counting.
The days.
The hours.
The distances.
The dimensions of the tunnels.
“The first time they took me inside the tunnel, I counted how many steps I was doing.”
He also taught himself Arabic by listening to the guards.
Without a clock or natural daylight, he tried to work out the passage of time by watching tiny changes in the light that filtered through a blanket covering part of the tunnel.
He turned observation into a form of resistance.
The more he understood about his surroundings, the less completely they could control him.
Learning how to survive his guards
Or also understood that his survival depended partly on the people assigned to watch him.
“Most of the time there were two guards with me, and I succeeded in building some kind of relationship with them,” he said.
He regarded that as one of his main objectives.
But not every guard was willing to treat him as a human being.
“One commander, he really hated me. Not just me — he really hated every Israeli. It didn’t matter who you were.”
According to Or, the commander deliberately tried to make his conditions worse and push him toward his physical and psychological limits.
Eventually, Or decided he could not spend the rest of his captivity simply waiting.
After roughly four months underground, he began looking for a way out.
“I know that I have to do something. I could not just sit.”
The tunnel he dug in secret
The opportunity came from something almost imperceptible.
While studying the cell, Or noticed a small current of air coming from behind a wall of sandbags.
It suggested there was another space beyond it.
With no proper equipment, he began digging.
He used scraps of plastic and other small objects he had collected. Eventually, he managed to obtain a small pickaxe.
The work was slow, exhausting and dangerous.
He kept going anyway.
“The human body, our limit is much beyond what we think. So you can do it, just keep going.”
The escape became a long-term project.
Drawing on his experience in electrical engineering and construction, Or found ways to extend light into the darkness and worked for roughly three months on the passage toward the surface.
In September 2026, when he launched Through the Earth, Or revealed that he had dug more than 10 metres by hand as part of the escape attempt. He also released drawings and diagrams he had made while in captivity.
Eventually, he reached the remains of a collapsed house.
He could see the sky.
He could hear people nearby.
For the first time in more than two years, freedom seemed within reach.
Then his luck ran out.
A change in the guards’ schedule meant one of his captors arrived with his regular food supply at precisely the wrong moment.
Or was discovered.
Captured, tortured and forced back underground
The consequences were brutal.
“They tied my hands behind my back and hung me from the ceiling.”
His wrists became severely swollen and he suffered nerve damage in his hands.
He was also tied to a plastic chair and deprived of sleep.
The escape attempt had failed.
But Or believes the experiences of his life had prepared him, in unexpected ways, for what followed.
“Every step in my life prepared me for this,” he said, referring in part to his service in an elite desert commando unit during his national service.
The skills he had acquired through engineering, construction and military service became tools for survival.
So did his ability to observe, calculate and keep working when the task appeared impossible.
The day he believed his prayer had been answered
There was another moment in captivity that Or now regards as a miracle.
On his 79th day underground, after seven years without speaking to God, he suddenly felt compelled to pray.
Bombs were shaking the tunnel.
He feared that the next strike could bring the concrete down on top of him.
“I had a strong feeling that I needed to talk,” he recalled.
For the first time in seven years, he prayed.
His prayer centered on the biblical commandment to honour his father and mother.
He told God that he had done his part.
Now, he said, it was God’s turn.
Hours later, a bomb struck the tunnel.
The impact caused the structure to collapse. A terrorist directly behind Or was killed.
Or tried to escape through the wreckage, only to become trapped beneath the rubble.
He believed he was about to be buried alive.
Then two terrorists farther ahead reached back through the debris and pulled him free.
Seconds later, the section he had just escaped collapsed.
He had survived by moments.
Asked whether he believed God had answered his prayer, Or’s answer was unequivocal.
“Absolutely.”
Freedom after 738 days
After 738 days, Or was finally released as part of a hostage agreement.
His return on October 13, 2025 marked the end of one of the longest captivity ordeals among the surviving Israeli hostages. The IDF confirmed that Or and other returning hostages had spent 738 days in captivity.
He was reunited with his parents.
And then came the meeting he had spent two years imagining.
Noa.
Argamani had been free for more than a year by then. Or had known almost nothing about the circumstances of her rescue.
When they finally met again, the two had been apart for 738 days.
Their reunion was photographed and quickly became another defining image of their story. Argamani later wrote that the couple had been separated “before the eyes of the entire world” and that they could finally begin the long process of recovery.
But surviving the same trauma did not mean they would emerge unchanged.
The relationship did not survive
The couple’s relationship had become known around the world because of the footage of their abduction.
Yet their time apart had changed both of them.
“People change because of different things after two years,” Or said.
In March 2026, Israeli reports confirmed that Or and Argamani had ended their relationship. The couple had initially kept the separation private.
Or has also made clear that some parts of their shared history will remain private.
“There are some things that we just want to stay between us,” he said.
That boundary is particularly striking given how little privacy they had on the day their lives were transformed.
Their separation was filmed.
Their captivity became a subject of international attention.
Their eventual reunion was photographed.
And even after returning home, their story remained in the public eye.
A final message from his captor
Just before Or’s release, he says one of his Hamas captors, a commander named Salim, gave him an unsettling message.
Salim told him to return home, greet his parents and then leave Israel.
“Move to Europe, move to the US, whatever you want — just leave Israel,” Or recalled being told.
When Or asked why, he says Salim answered that as long as Israel existed, Hamas would carry out an October 7 “over and over again.”
Or eventually returned to Israel.
His captivity had lasted 738 days.
His escape attempt had failed.
But he had survived.
And nearly a year after coming home, he decided to put the experience into words.
Through the Earth was published in Hebrew in September 2026, documenting the physical and psychological struggle of those 738 days and the escape tunnel he secretly dug beneath Gaza. The book is due to be translated into English.
The man in the video, three years later
There is one final detail that brings Or’s story back to the footage with which it began.
The man seen driving the motorcycle that carried Argamani toward Gaza on October 7 was later killed in an Israeli airstrike.
The Israel Police announced the operation in September 2026, identifying him as Saher Nidal Latfi Sakr and saying he had driven the motorcycle used in the abduction of Argamani and Or.
Or watched the footage again three years after the day he was taken.
The images have changed little.
Argamani reaches toward him.
He is held by armed men.
The motorcycle moves away.
This time, however, Or was watching from home.
“We Jewish people do not celebrate the death of people,” he said. “But I am glad there’s one less terrorist left in the world.”