Hostage Avinatan Or Reveals Torture Inside Gaza Tunnel After Rescue

The scream sticks in the mind. Noa Argamani is thrown onto a motorcycle and driven toward Gaza while she screams, 'Don't kill me.' That picture dominated the front page of the Mail on Sunday and spread globally in seconds. Just yards away, her boyfriend Avinatan Or sits helpless as men from Gaza drag him through fields. The clip lasts only moments but it defines the October 7 attack, a massacre that killed roughly 1,200 Jews since the Holocaust and took 251 hostages into Gaza.

It is now three years later. Or has finally told his story for the first time. He explains how he and Argamani fled the Nova music festival before their ordeal tore them apart for more than two years. He also reveals how he spent long days in isolation deep beneath Gaza, digging a secret tunnel to try to escape, only to get caught and brutally tortured by his captors. His account appears in his new memoir, 'Through the Earth.' The book hit number one on bestseller lists in Israel and is set for an English translation.

'We drove out from the festival area and we tried to get to the main road,' Or told reporters. Footage of Argamani's kidnapping at Nova, where nearly 400 partygoers died, was among the first videos of the massacre to surface online. At around 10:30 am on that dark morning, the couple heard footsteps and Arabic voices.

'I heard one guy come to us,' Or recalled. 'I heard the steps. And then we knew we would be found.' When the man saw them he shouted, 'There are Jews here.' Argamani screamed as Or tried to help her get away, but they were surrounded by a large group. Suddenly many hands grabbed them and started marching them toward Gaza.

They walked on foot for about 15 minutes. As they moved near the border, Or kept looking up at the sky for any aircraft and down at the ground for signs of Israeli forces. He saw nothing. Then, perhaps 100 or 200 metres from the line, a motorcycle arrived and Argamani was taken away. That is when the world-famous footage begins: she screams while being driven off, reaching back for Or. Just metres behind her, he stands restrained by a large group of men with his hands bound.

'In that situation, I know that's nothing I can do because I'm surrounded by maybe 25 people,' he said. For roughly two hours before the attack hit, they hid in silence inside a ditch after turning their car into the field when shooting started. During those quiet minutes Or thought about how well Argamani held her nerve and told himself she did very, very well.

Or's relationship with Argamani became famous because of those haunting images from October 7. It ultimately could not survive what they went through together. He spoke to the Daily Mail about his 738 days in Hamas captivity inside Gaza. The book is an immediate number one bestseller in Israel soon to be translated into English. And now, on this third anniversary, the world finally hears the full story of a man who dug for freedom and paid a terrible price for it.

In the video, you can see four or five of them. He understood that fighting back would probably mean his death. 'We were surrounded, and I understood that screaming and starting to fight was not an option because it would be the end.' Watching Argamani being taken away left him with a crushing sense of helplessness. 'It was my job to protect her,' he remembered thinking, 'and there wasn't anything I could do about it.' Then the motorcycle disappeared. What happened to Or immediately afterwards was never captured by the infamous video. 'And just after they took her, they started to lynch me. There were maybe 10 or 15 people who started to lynch me.'

He described being struck 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. And I started to bleed, all over my shirt and over my face. And then they all started to punch me and kick me.' Eventually, Or said, an armed Hamas terrorist fired into the air, scattering the group around him. He was put on another motorcycle and taken across the border into Gaza. Within hours, he was underground. Argamani was gone. 'The next time I saw her,' Or said, 'I was in the hospital 738 days later.'

For much of those 738 days, he had been given false news. '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 into captivity, one of his captors finally answered him. 'One of them told me: "Noa is home."' Or believed him. 'And since that day,' he said, 'for me, she was released.' But Hamas had lied to him. She wasn't actually freed until 245 days into the war, when special forces entered Gaza in a daring operation that left elite soldier Arnon Zmora dead.

Or would spend 738 days underground, most of it in total isolation, without sunlight, fresh air or a proper bathroom. At 6ft 4in, he could not even stand upright in the low tunnels and his spine curved for all that time. 'I couldn't stretch my body. 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.' His battle was not only to keep his body alive, but to stop his captors taking control of his mind.

'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.' 'From the first day I entered the tunnel, I started to count everything I could. The days, the time, 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 taught himself Arabic by listening to his captors and devised his own methods of keeping track of time. Even without a clock or natural light, he watched for tiny changes in light beyond a blanket in the tunnel and attempted to calculate when each new day began.

He also understood that his survival depended on the men guarding him. 'Most of the time there were two guards with me, and I succeeded in building some kind of relationship with them. This was one of my main missions.' 'But one commander, he really hated me. Not just me, he really hated every Israeli. It didn't matter who you were. And he really wanted to make my life as hard as he could, to push me to the edge and make my conditions worse.' After about four months underground, Or decided he could no longer simply wait for somebody else to determine whether he lived or died. 'I know that I have to do something.

I could not just sit," Or said. He studied his cell for weaknesses until he spotted a tiny current of air behind a wall of sandbags. That small gap suggested another passage lay beyond it. Without proper tools, he secretly began digging with scraps of plastic and other small objects he had collected over time. Later, he managed to steal a small pickaxe to help with the work. Whenever exhaustion threatened to overwhelm him, he forced himself to continue. "The human body, our limit is much beyond what we think," he noted. "So you can do it, just keep going." He told this story in his newly released memoir, *Through the Earth*, an immediate number one bestseller in Israel soon to be translated into English.

Or described his escape attempt and his time in captivity with chilling detail. On his 79th day underground, after seven years of not speaking to God, he suddenly felt compelled to pray. Bombs shook the tunnel constantly. He feared "the next bomb" would bring the concrete down on his head. "I had a strong feeling that I needed to talk," he recalled. For the first time in seven years, he turned to God. He prayed about the biblical commandment to honour his father and mother, telling God he had done his part, and now it was God's turn. Hours later, a bomb smashed into the tunnel. As Or tried to escape through the wreckage, the tunnel collapsed around him, killing the terrorist directly behind him.

Trapped in the rubble, he believed he was about to be buried alive until two terrorists ahead of him reached back and pulled him free with their hands. Seconds later, the section he had just escaped from collapsed. He had survived by seconds. Drawing on his electrical-engineering and construction experience, he rigged wires to carry light farther into the tunnel and spent roughly three months digging towards the surface. Eventually, he reached the ruins of a collapsed house and could see the sky and hear people nearby. Freedom appeared agonisingly close.

But back in the tunnel, there had been a change in the schedule. Just when Or was deep into his manmade tunnel, one of his captors arrived with his bi-weekly bag of food. He was discovered, reprimanded, and then tortured. "They tied my hands behind my back and hung me from the ceiling," he said. "My wrists were so swollen and I have nerve damage in my hands." They tied him to a plastic chair so he would be sleep deprived. Or believes the skills and experiences he had accumulated throughout his life had given him the tools to keep surviving. "Every step in my life prepared me for this," he admitted, paying tribute to the elite desert commando unit he served in during his national service.

There was another moment during captivity that Or would come to see as nothing short of a miracle. Saher Nidal Latfi Sakr, the terrorist who kidnapped him, was killed in an airstrike on the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza in an operation by Israel Police's Gideonim Unit 33. After 738 days, the final hostage release agreement procured his freedom. But even in his last moments underground, Or says one of his captors left him with a chilling warning. Just before his release, a Hamas commander called 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," he recalled being told. When Or asked why, Salim told him that as long as Israel existed, Hamas would carry out October 7 "over and over again." Freedom also meant confronting how much life had changed during the 738 days he had been gone. When asked whether he believed God had answered him, his response was simple: "Absolutely.

The bond between him and Argamani, once famous globally due to those chilling October 7 images, could not survive the trauma they faced together. He noted that people shift after two years because different things happen. Yet, even with such massive public attention on their story, he insists some parts remain private. 'There are some things that we just want to stay between us,' he stated. The terrorist who rode Argamani away on a motorcycle that day was later killed by the IDF, a fact announced the day before our interview took place. Or watched the footage again, now three years since his kidnapping into Gaza. 'We Jewish people do not celebrate the death of people, but I am glad there's one less terrorist left in the world.