Kidnapped from Israel

The October 7 attack occurred on Shabbat and the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, when attackers crossed from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel.[2] Communities, military installations and outdoor music events near Gaza became sites of killings, injuries and abductions during the coordinated assault.[5] Rocket fire accompanied attacks on 22 civilian communities, the Nova music festival and approximately a dozen Israel Defense Forces bases and posts.[2]

The Supernova Sukkot Gathering, commonly referred to as the Nova festival, was a multiday outdoor event near Re’im that began around October 6.[5] More than 3,000 people from multiple countries, including the United States, attended the festival.[5] Its international audience was among the groups exposed to the following morning’s attack, alongside residents of nearby towns and kibbutzim and soldiers serving at military locations.[5]

Individual accounts place some festivalgoers at the event shortly before the assault began.[6] Michael Levy recounted that his brother Or and Or’s wife, Eynav, arrived at 6:20 a.m., having left their two-year-old son with his grandparents.[6] They subsequently fled to a bomb shelter near Kibbutz Re’im, where attackers killed Eynav and took Or into Gaza.[6]

Four Israelis had already been held in Gaza before October 2023, a distinction important to the later accounting of the hostage crisis.[7][3] They were soldiers Oron Shaul and Hadar Goldin, whose bodies were held after they were killed in 2014, and civilians Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, who entered Gaza in subsequent years.[7][3] Later accounting covered these four cases alongside the 251 people taken on October 7, producing a broader total of 255.[7][3]

At approximately 6:30 a.m. on October 7, more than 2,000 armed attackers entered southern Israel in a coordinated incursion by land, sea and air.[5] They crossed through at least seven locations, using trucks, motorcycles, bulldozers, speedboats and paragliders.[5] Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups attacked civilian communities, military bases and two music-festival sites, taking people into Gaza amid the wider assault.[1]

The places attacked included Kfar Aza, Be’eri, Nir Oz, Nahal Oz, Re’im, Holit, Zikim, Kerem Shalom and Sufa, as well as Sderot and the festival near Re’im.[5] Hundreds of civilians and Israeli soldiers were killed or wounded, while others, including Americans, were abducted.[5] Captives were transported on foot and in cars, motorcycles, tractors and other vehicles; the abductors included terrorists and Palestinian civilians.[3]

A retrospective breakdown identifies 44 Israelis taken from the Nova festival in the Re’im forest and 207 Israelis and foreign nationals taken from kibbutzim, military bases and combat zones near the Gaza border.[3] The hostage population consequently encompassed people seized in their homes, people attending a recreational event and soldiers at their places of service.[3] Infants, children, women, entire families, older people and Holocaust survivors were among those taken.[1]

At Nova, more than 50 attackers assaulted festivalgoers on the morning of October 7.[5] Videos subsequently showed some attendees being held captive in Gaza.[5] People fleeing the festival also sought shelter along nearby roads, where some were killed and others abducted.[6] Michael Levy’s account described attackers entering the shelter where Or and Eynav had taken refuge, killing 18 people, including Eynav, and taking Or away.[6]

Twenty-three-year-old Hersh Goldberg-Polin was abducted after being wounded by a grenade in a roadside shelter.[8] Survivors hid beneath bodies, while four badly wounded young men, including Goldberg-Polin, were forced onto a pickup truck and taken into Gaza.[8] He was subsequently held in a civilian home and underground tunnels before being killed alongside five other hostages.[8]

In Be’eri, one family’s attempted abduction involved a grandmother, a mother, a father and their three-year-old daughter.[5] The grandmother and another adult relative were separated from the parents and child, who were forced into a vehicle with armed attackers.[5] The father and daughter escaped before the vehicle reached the Gaza border and returned to safety; the mother’s whereabouts remained unknown when the legal account of the incident was filed.[5] The grandmother was executed after being abducted.[5]

Attackers also took multiple Kfar Aza residents hostage, including at least one American.[5] An image from the attack showed an elderly resident being transported toward Gaza in a cart-like vehicle.[5] Approximately 200 armed attackers entered Nir Oz and abducted residents, with video showing a mother and her four-year-old and nine-month-old sons being taken captive.[5]

The Bibas family—Shiri and Yarden and their sons Ariel and Kfir—were abducted from their home in Nir Oz.[2] Footage recorded by the attackers showed Shiri clutching her two young children as they were taken away.[2] Yarden was released alive in February 2025, while Shiri’s remains were returned after an initial handover of remains that DNA testing established were not hers.[2]

The identification of hostages did not occur all at once: some people were initially listed as missing before their families learned that they had been abducted.[9] Andrey Kozlov’s family learned of his abduction weeks after he disappeared from the Nova festival.[9] Inbar Hyman’s family saw video showing her being taken toward Gaza.[9] Hostage profiles assembled from family and official information included children, teenagers, adults and elderly people, while some names were withheld at relatives’ request.[9]

The 251-person accounting comprised 159 males and 92 females, including 32 infants, children or young people aged between nine months and 18 years.[1] Another 97 children and young people had one or both parents taken hostage.[1] The group included men, women and children, Israeli and foreign citizens, and Jews, Muslims and Christians.[10]

Foreign citizenship was a substantial feature of the hostage population: 138 captives held foreign passports, including people with Thai, Argentinian, German, American, French, Russian, Chinese, Sri Lankan, Tanzanian and Filipino nationality.[11] Published nationality figures included 54 Thais, 15 Argentinians, 12 Germans and 12 Americans.[11] A later congressional resolution described the October 7 hostages as including citizens of more than 40 countries.[12]

In November 2023, hostage-family representative Rachel Goldberg described captives from almost 30 countries, ranging in age from nine months to 87 years and belonging to Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu communities.[13] The account named three-year-old Ema Cunio, 84-year-old Amiram Cooper, 56-year-old Maya Goren, 38-year-old Tal Shoham and 60-year-old Noralin Babadilla Agojo among those abducted.[13]

Families at that stage did not know where their relatives were, whether they were alive or injured, or which armed group held them.[13] No humanitarian organization had been granted access, and captives were not necessarily being held together in one location.[13] These descriptions concerned the early period of captivity in November 2023 rather than the eventual fate of every hostage.[13]

The abductions included children whose parents had been killed during the attack.[11] Four-year-old Avigail Idan was taken while hiding at a neighbor’s home after the murder of her parents.[11] Her case formed part of the wider group of children and young people whose captivity or parents’ abduction was recorded in the official accounting.[1][11]

Four hostages were released during the early weeks of the war, and 105 hostages were freed during the weeklong truce in November 2023.[2] Across the first two years, most returning hostages came home through exchange agreements, while others were rescued alive or returned as remains.[10] Military operations and negotiated releases thus formed distinct routes of return throughout the crisis.[2]

Israeli soldier Ori Megidish became the first hostage rescued by the IDF on October 30, 2023.[2] The eventual military tally included eight hostages rescued alive by troops.[3] Subsequent operations involved intelligence gathering, preparation for entering places of confinement and the extraction of captives under fire.[11][14]

On February 12, 2024, Israeli forces rescued Fernando Simon Marman and Luis Har from an apartment in Rafah.[14] Marman, 60, and Har, 70, were originally from Argentina and had been abducted from Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak.[14] The mission, called Operation Golden Hand, involved the IDF, Shin Bet and the police Yamam unit.[2][14]

Weeks of intelligence gathering preceded the Rafah raid, and the forces extracted the two men at approximately 1:50 a.m.[14] Both were reported to be in good condition after their rescue.[14] Their return was one of the military recoveries of living hostages during 2024.[2]

On June 8, 2024, Israeli forces rescued Noa Argamani, Almog Meir, Andrey Kozlov and Shlomi Ziv, all of whom had been abducted from the Nova festival.[15] They were held at two sites a few hundred meters apart in Nuseirat, in central Gaza.[15] The operation involved the IDF, Shin Bet and Yamam, and Yamam officer Arnon Zmora was fatally wounded.[15]

Preparation for the Nuseirat rescue lasted weeks and included building models of apartments where hostages were believed to be held.[11] The unusual daytime raid met heavy resistance, with firefights particularly intense during the withdrawal.[11] The four captives were brought out, while the officer leading the mission lost his life.[2]

A ceasefire beginning in January 2025 returned 30 living hostages, while remains were also returned during the deal.[2][7] One dual American-Israeli citizen was released in May 2025.[3] As of October 7, 2025, 48 hostages remained in captivity, including the remains of American citizens Itay Chen and Omer Neutra.[16]

The final 20 living hostages returned on October 13, 2025, in connection with a U.S.-brokered ceasefire.[10] The remaining deceased hostages were returned over the following months, culminating in the recovery of Ran Gvili.[2] Implementation steps also included Israel’s release of 250 prisoners serving life sentences and approximately 1,700 Gazans detained after October 7, 2023.[17]

Ran Gvili’s remains were recovered and returned to Israel on January 26, 2026, completing the return of the people taken on October 7.[2] Gvili, an officer in the southern district police’s Yasam Negev unit, had been killed while fighting at Kibbutz Alumim.[18] On the morning of the attack he had been waiting in a hospital for surgery, but left to help when he heard what was happening.[18]

At 10:50 a.m. that morning, Gvili messaged friends that he had been shot twice in the leg; his whereabouts subsequently became unknown.[18] His remains were identified during a search operation in a cemetery in northern Gaza in which approximately 250 bodies were examined.[18] His return ended the presence in Gaza of hostages or hostage remains covered by the final accounting.[18]

The recovery also completed the broader accounting of 255 people: the 251 taken on October 7 and the four held since earlier years.[7][3] Gvili’s return marked the first time since 2014 that no Israeli hostage or hostage remains were held captive in the Gaza Strip.[19]

A May 2026 implementation report recorded 168 of the 251 as having returned alive.[17] A later October 2026 accounting instead reported 166 released alive and 85 returned deceased; it classified 44 of the deceased as already dead when abducted and 41 as abducted alive and killed in captivity.[20] In some cases, Israeli military actions, including airstrikes, were confirmed to have caused hostages’ deaths.[20]

A separate civilian-only tally recorded 216 civilian hostages returned from Gaza: 154 alive and 62 whose bodies were returned for burial.[21] The living civilian returnees included 29 foreign nationals, while the deceased included six foreign nationals.[21] This civilian tally had a narrower scope than the broader accounting of all 255 captives, which also included soldiers and the four earlier cases.[7][21]

Medical care for returnees addressed both the consequences of captivity and the restoration of personal autonomy.[22] A peer-reviewed study examined the treatment of 10 women aged 29 to 85 who were released in November 2023 and cared for at Wolfson Medical Center after 48 to 55 days in captivity.[22] Seven had suffered direct trauma during the attack or captivity, and eight had chronic illnesses that had gone without proper medication.[22]

Half of the women arrived at high risk of refeeding syndrome, and the patients had lost up to 25 percent of their baseline body weight.[22] Their care used a multidisciplinary approach to physical and psychological needs.[22] Staff also gave them wristwatches and replaced confiscated glasses or broken hearing aids as practical steps toward restoring autonomy.[22] The broader official account of captivity included torture, sexual abuse and other ill-treatment of many hostages.[1]

Artists and activists displayed posters bearing hostages’ faces across New York City after the October 7 attack.[23] The “Kidnapped from Israel” posters appeared in New York and elsewhere during the following days and weeks, including at subway stations, restaurants and politicians’ offices.[4] Their display made individual captives visible in public places far from the sites of their abduction.[4][23]

Nitzan Mintz and Dede BandAid designed the posters.[23] The documentary TORN, directed by Nim Shapira, followed the conflict surrounding their display and removal.[23] Initially released in 2024, the film runs 75 minutes.[4] Events connected to the documentary included activist Nina Mogilnik and Julia Simon, a friend of hostage Omer Neutra.[23]

People tore down posters while others defended them, creating a conflict over public space and free speech that became central to the documentary.[23] A billboard outside The New York Times’ headquarters featured photographs of Raz and Aviv Asher, identified as five and three years old, who had been taken hostage while visiting their grandmother’s village near the Gaza border.[24] Its message accused antisemites of tearing down hostage posters and criticized the newspaper’s treatment of poster removal.[24]

The imagery of individual families also remained prominent beyond the posters.[2] The recording of Shiri Bibas holding Ariel and Kfir became one of the symbols of the hostage crisis.[2] The documentary and poster displays similarly placed the identities and faces of captives at the center of public engagement with their captivity.[4][23]

Published totals varied over time and across sources, although several retrospective accounts used 251 for the number taken on October 7.[2][10] Earlier and alternative counts included 240 in November 2023, 253 in the U.S. terrorism report covering 2023 and 254 in the October 2025 anniversary statement.[13][16] Other publications used 250 or 253, without resolving their differences from the later 251-person accounting.[25][26] These variations do not alter the separate distinction between the October 7 group and the broader total of 255 including four earlier captives.[7]

Outcome figures also differed: the May 2026 implementation report recorded 168 returned alive, while the October 2026 accounting recorded 166 alive and 85 deceased among the 251 taken on October 7.[17][20] An earlier January 2026 account cited 38 hostages abducted alive and killed in captivity after October 8, whereas the later account gave 41 abducted alive and killed in captivity.[27][20] The available reports do not fully reconcile these figures.[27][17]

Interpretations of the abductions extend beyond their immediate military and bargaining functions.[28] Noga Halevi argues that hostage-taking functioned as a form of cognitive warfare aimed at Israeli decision-making and public cohesion.[28] Her analysis interprets hostage videos, messages to families and instructions concerning the isolation, restraint and evacuation of captives as components of psychological pressure.[28]

The poster conflict generated a separate dispute over public protest and media framing.[29] Critics argued that descriptions of poster removal as protest or an outlet for anguish over Israeli policy created a false moral equivalence between displaying and removing the posters.[29] The documentary’s accompanying public discussion addressed the broader conflict over public space and free speech.[23]