On the afternoon of October 6th 2023, Shelly Shem Tov went to Jerusalem to celebrate her birthday with her husband Malki and their three children. Omer, the youngest at 21, had finished his compulsory military service a few months before and was working as a waiter in a smart restaurant in Tel Aviv in order to save money to go travelling. “We ate, we laughed, we drank wine,” Shelly remembered. “On the way back I was very grateful. I looked up at the sky and I thanked God for all that I had.”

The family returned to their comfortable house in Hertzliya, an upscale city just north of Tel Aviv. Omer went to pick up his friend Maya Regev and her brother Itay from their home. The siblings were just back from a trip to Mexico, and Omer had convinced them to go to a music festival. He had been at a trance party once before and fallen in love with the scene. “The freedom,” he told me, “the love in the air, the bond between people. You feel you are in a bubble of love, you forget about every­thing for a few hours.” He sighed in the retelling, laconic and rueful at the absurd horror of all that had followed. “Yeah, so we went to a party.”

Omer looks different now, after spending 505 days in captivity in Gaza. His brown hair is cropped shorter than the floppy waves that fell across his forehead back in 2023 – an image familiar to Israelis from posters demanding the return of the hostages who had been kidnapped by Hamas during the October 7th attacks.