Tal Shoham and his family were visiting his in-laws for Sukkot (the Feast of Booths) when, in the early morning hours of October 7, 2023, radical Islamist terrorists burst into the unsuspecting kibbutz, changing his life and the lives of his family forever. For 505 days, Shoham endured ridicule, deprivation, uncertainty, and abuse until his release on February 22, 2025.

Taken to Gaza

“The terrorists just came, dozens of them, fully armed, to an unarmed community in the kibbutz,” Shoham related at Family Research Council headquarters in Washington, D.C. “After they broke into the room, they took me out first,” he said. “They threw me into a trunk of a car and just drove to Gaza.”

Shoham had no way to know that the terrorist kidnapped nine members of his wife’s family gathered for the holiday and murdered four more, including his father-in-law. Nor did he know, until much later, that his wife “ran after” and “struggled with the terrorists with great bravery” to prevent her separation from their daughters, ages eight and three.

“When we arrived in Gaza, one of the terrorists jumped on the roof of the car and pointed his Kalashnikov on me and told me to get down on my knees,” Shoham continued. “And I knew in that moment — I could see it in his eyes — that he wanted to execute me. … He didn’t manage to kill enough people” during the terrorist incursion into Israel.

Though captured, Shoham would not die quietly. “So, I raised my hand, and I argued with him that, ‘You can do whatever you like, but I’m not going to my knees.’ I surrendered and, practically, he should not kill me,” he said. “We argued like that for half a minute. And then another terrorist just took me in the shelter.”

“We started to walk in the streets of Gaza, searching for a place to hide,” said Shoham, “because they probably didn’t have a plan [of] what to do with us after they kidnapped us.” Despite the radical decentralization of Hamas foot soldiers, officials ratified their initiative in taking hostages.

“Then a policeman on a motorbike came and … put me on the bike and did a parade in the street in the main streets of Gaza, shouting, ‘We got a Jewish soldier,’ or something like that,” Shoham continued. “Everyone was shouting and happy and tried to beat me with sticks and fists. But I was lucky enough that the motorbike didn’t stay enough time in every spot.”

Solitary Confinement

“After a while, another police car came. And they put me inside it and took me to a hidden house of one of their leaders,” Shoham said. “They shackled me with military grade handcuffs, [and] I was like that for 34 days, 24/7 … in solitary [confinement], handcuffed, and starved.”

“It was one of the most intense periods of my life, because I could not stop thinking about my family,” he recalled. “I didn’t have anything to do there because I was alone. So, it’s like compulsive thoughts going on and on and on.” For the first 50 days, Shoham knew nothing about what became of his family. “I didn’t have peace of mind the whole time because all day long I thought [about] what happened to them, and if they were murdered, if they were kidnapped.”

“But, after 50 days, I received a letter from my wife describing that they were kidnapped and … they were about to be released,” he said. “I knew that now I have a reason to come back, and there will be a family that will wait [for] me if I will survive it.”

Tal’s wife, Adi Shoham, was released as part of the first and largest prisoner exchange on November 25, along with her daughters, Naveh and Yahel, and her mother, Shoshan Haran.

Bonds Forged through Captivity

After just over a month in solitary confinement, Shoham “was really glad” to be joined by two younger hostages, Guy Dalal and Evyatar David, “so I [wouldn’t] be alone anymore.” The three hostages “forged a bond together,” Shoham said. But little did he expect the months of brutal torment that lay ahead. “I’m not speaking about regular hunger. It’s a hunger that eats you from within. It’s 24/7 pains that nothing can release or can make disappear. [They] wake you in the night. You fantasize on food every moment.”

“One of the cruelest things that the terrorists did is that they gave us so little, but they all the time [ate] more, with fresh fruits and vegetables, and made us know that they are having great meals in the other room,” he added.

This was consistent with the “humiliation process” to which the terrorists subjected their captives, Shoham shared. “The prime guard would come in the afternoon and just call us one by one, slap us, [laughing at us]. And he was careful not to leave bruises on us, so nobody would see that he did something. But it was daily.” The guards mocked Dalal and David, both captured at the Nova Music Festival, by joking about their friends who were murdered there. “He used to ask him, ‘How was the Nova?’ — doing those machine gun noises and laughing,” said Shoham.

The terrorists also lied to the hostages, telling them that their families had forgotten about them, and that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were coming to kill them. “They put so much psychological pressure on us, with severe starvation, that we actually started to believe that the IDF [was] trying to kill us,” Shoham related. “There was time that the IDF started to approach us, and they, in the apartment, geared up with explosives.”

Tormented in the Tunnels

The captives had no idea their situation could worsen. In June 2024, their captors told them they were being transferred to a medical facility, which was better equipped with running water and electricity. “Then they put a corona mask on our eyes and took us to a tunnel,” said Shoham. “In the beginning, I thought that we would just go through the tunnel and go out the next entrance. But we just walked and walked for more than two hours inside their empire underground — until we heard an Israeli hostage speaking with them. They told him that they brought him company — and then my heart just went down to my pants because I understood that now we are going to stay there forever, practically.” This new hostage was Omer Wenkert.

The four men shared a tunnel three feet wide and 30 feet long, but most of that space was occupied by mattresses on which the men slept — mattresses lying right on the floor of sand. “The lack of oxygen was so severe that for three weeks we couldn’t think straight,” said Shoham. “I think I slept 14 hours every night because the brain couldn’t work.”

Three small lightbulbs allowed the captives to see, but the terrorists refused to turn the lights off at night, giving the captives no way to distinguish between night and day. A hole in the floor served for a toilet, but the men were only allowed to use a nearby shower once every three weeks.

High humidity caused the men’s clothes to stick to their skin, but their captors would not allow them to remove their shirts — for no other reason than their own capricious will. “They watched us on camera to make sure that we obeyed their rules,” Shoham recalled.

The hostages were kept on their starvation diet, consisting of “a small portion of rice or one pita bread once every 24 hours,” he said. But they could hardly look forward to this daily “meal” because their jailors would come to torment them, “shouting [at] us, beating us, spitting on us, making bizarre rules that we should obey,” like ordering them not to sleep or they would be beaten.

“It’s so tough as it is underground in this tomb, why [did] they need to do such effort to try to inflict us in so many different ways?” asked Shoham. “Just to stay balanced or secured mentally and emotionally was the biggest effort that we needed to handle every day.”

To make matters worse, the hostages soon learned that one of their captors was “psychotic” — as in, “hearing voices,” “seeing things that [are] not there” — and consequently more sadistic than his companions. “When the other terrorists didn’t look, he used to do even worse things: He shut off the light in the tunnel — and there is no external light … so we could not see even our hands in front of our heads — and he would keep us like that for 12 hours, 15 hours in this eternal darkness.”

This guard “put fire outside of the iron door of the tunnel, directing the smoke into the tunnel. And we just suffocated. We laid on the ground, and we hoped that it [would] be soon over because we got to the point … that 10 more minutes like that and we would just suffocate to death there,” Shoham asserted. Afterward, “he came, and he laughed about it and say, ‘Ah, it was the IDF [trying] to enter the tunnel,’ which of course wasn’t true.”

The psychotic guard would come in to “laugh with us” one moment, said Shoham, and the next moment he would curse at them, exclaiming “that we [would] rot in this tomb, and nobody [would] save us.” He ordered one hostage to lie down as he beat him. And he ordered another to stand blindfolded, without moving, for two hours.

Finally, after nearly two years of hard fighting, terrorist duplicity, and obstruction by the Biden administration, Israel was able to negotiate the release of enough hostages that Hamas planned to let Shoham and Wenkert go free. But even in this, the terrorists displayed studied cruelty and hardness.

The terrorists teased their prisoners with the thought of release, gleefully capturing even their tortured reactions. “Two weeks before I was released, the officer came and told us that he’s got good news and bad news,” Shoham explained. “And I asked him, ‘What is the news?’ He said, ‘No, no, I will come tomorrow with a camera, and then I will tell you.’ And he came to film us, and he told us that one of us [was] going to be released, [but] the others will need to stay here. Then he tried to film how we [felt] about it.”

After that, the guard would “joke about it and say, ‘You are going out. No, no, you are going out. No, you’re going out,’ like it’s kind of a game, Shoham recalled. “We are trying to survive in this underground tomb, and he is playing with us and trying to inflict us psychologically.”

Just before their release, the guard “filmed us eating with him — a big plate of rice and meat — and having fun together like it [was] normal. But it wasn’t. [It was] only there for their film.” Then he told Shoham and Wenkert that they would be released, while trying to film the downcast reactions of Dalal and David. “After a few hours, we were separated, and three days later we were freed — but not before they took them and told them that they also will be released.”

The terrorists took Dalal and David above ground to watch the release of their fellow hostages — the last evidence their families have that these young men are still alive. “They [were] in a van looking on us when we [were] being released, and they were only 10 or 20 meters from us, 20 meters from salvation,” Shoham recalled. “Then they told them, ‘Oh no, you’re staying here. You’re going underground again. How do you feel?’ And again, [they were] filming them like it’s a kind of game.”

Freedom Again, with a Purpose

“I was blessed that I can come back and reunite with my family,” concluded Shoham. “Already, three and a half months home, and I feel like [it was] a far and distant nightmare, I mean, almost unrealistic. I need to do a reality check to even realize that it has actually happened.”

The psalmist describes a similar salvation, “Some sat in darkness and in the shadow of death, prisoners in affliction and in irons,” then the Lord “brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and burst their bonds apart” (Psalm 107:10, 14).

But Shoham remembers that the nightmare is not over for Dalal, David, and the other hostages remaining in Hamas’s inhumane captivity. “Now as we’re sitting here, they are still there, underground, suffering the same torture and torment and without any end in sight,” he lamented. “We are really afraid that if they won’t be released soon, they will find their death there. Because who knows what this psychotic guard can do.”

Every American above a certain age remembers where they were on September 11, 2001, when they first heard the news that radical Islamist terrorists had flown hijacked passenger jets into the Twin Towers. I was six years old, folding socks in the living room with my mother and siblings before our day of homeschool began.

Israel’s “9/11 moment” came on October 7, 2023. And, while traumatic for the entire nation, the infamous day had to be especially scarring for those captured by Hamas and taken into captivity. Released captives like Shoham are like the survivors who escaped the burning towers. And, after being freed, Shoham has turned around to aid the rescue effort. Years may have passed, but there are still survivors buried beneath the rubble.