Noa Argamani’s Ex Recalls Gaza Ordeal Three Years After Oct. 7 Kidnap

The image remains etched in the public memory: Noa Argamani perched on the back of a motorcycle as she was driven toward Gaza, her arms reaching outward while she cried, “Don’t kill me.”

Published on the front page of the Mail on Sunday, the photograph and video quickly became symbols of the October 7 attack around the world.

Nearby, Argamani’s boyfriend, Avinatan Or, then 33, was being forced through the fields by Gaza gunmen, powerless to intervene.

The footage lasted just seconds, yet it became one of the defining records of an assault that killed 1,200 people and saw 251 hostages dragged into Gaza—the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Now, on the third anniversary of the attack, Or has spoken publicly for the first time about how he and Argamani, who had been together for more than a year, escaped the Nova music festival before being separated for more than two years.

He has also described surviving years in isolation beneath Gaza, including a desperate attempt to dig a tunnel to freedom that ended when his captors discovered him and subjected him to brutal torture.

Or recounts his captivity and failed escape in his newly published memoir, Through the Earth, which quickly became Israel’s number one bestseller and is due to be translated into English.

“We drove out from the festival area and tried to reach the main road,” Or told us.

“They began shooting at us, so we turned around and drove into the field. We found a place and hid in a ditch,” he said.

For about two hours, the couple stayed hidden, barely making a sound.

“Actually, we didn’t speak,” Or recalled. “In the car, I remember thinking—I don’t know—I was proud of her because she handled it very, very well. She didn’t panic. She stayed completely calm.

“I told her, ‘Nice job. I’m very proud of you.’ But while we were hiding, we remained silent, communicating only with our eyes.”

At about 10.30am, the silence was broken by approaching footsteps and voices speaking Arabic.

“I heard a man coming toward us,” Or said. “I heard the footsteps, and then we knew we were going to be found. When he saw us, he shouted, ‘There are Jews here.’”

Or said Argamani screamed when the men discovered them. He turned back and tried to help her flee, but they were quickly surrounded.

“Suddenly, I heard Noa scream. I turned around and tried to reach her—I tried to help her escape,” he said. “There were many of them around us. They began taking us toward Gaza.”

The pair were marched for roughly 15 minutes. As they approached the border, Or repeatedly scanned the sky for an aircraft and searched the ground for any indication that Israeli forces might come to their rescue.

But he didn’t see anything.

Then, when they were perhaps 100 or 200 metres from the border, a motorcycle arrived and Argamani was taken away.

It is here that the footage seen around the world begins: Argamani is driven away screaming on the motorcycle, reaching for Or. 

Just metres away, Or is restrained by a large group of men, his hands bound behind his back.

‘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 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.

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‘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,’ he said.

Studying his cell for weaknesses, he noticed a tiny current of air behind a wall of sandbags and realised there might be another passage beyond it. 

With no proper tools, he secretly began digging with scraps of plastic and other small objects he had collected. 

Later on, he managed to steal a small pickaxe to help with the digging.

Whenever exhaustion threatened to overwhelm him, he forced himself to continue.

‘The human body, our limit is much beyond what we think. So you can do it, just keep going.’

After days of digging, he finally broke through the sandbags and entered the pitch-black space beyond.

‘You can taste the darkness, then smell the darkness,’ he recalled.

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, and 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. My wrists were so swollen and I have nerve damage in my hands. They tied me to a plastic chair so I’d 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,’ a nod 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.

On his 79th day underground, after seven years of not speaking to God, he suddenly felt compelled to pray. 

Bombs were shaking the tunnel and 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.

When asked whether he believed God had answered him, his response was simple: ‘Absolutely.’

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. His relationship with Argamani, which had become known around the world because of those haunting images from October 7, ultimately did not survive their ordeal.

‘People change because of different things after two years,’ he explained.

But despite the extraordinary public interest in the couple, Or says there are parts of their story they have chosen to keep to themselves.

‘There are some things that we just want to stay between us,’ he said.

The terrorist seen driving Argamani away on the motorcycle on October 7 was later eliminated by the IDF — news that was announced the day before our interview.

Or watched back the video, now three years since the day he was kidnapped 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.’