Five for Fighting serenades ‘Superhero’ Alon Ohel, other hostages

American singer-songwriter John Ondrasik, known by his stage name Five for Fighting, has revamped his post-9/11 hit “Superman” in honor of Alon Ohel, 24, an avid pianist who was snatched from the Nova music festival during the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023.

In the original ballad, sung from the point of view of an anguished superhero, Ondrasik sings: “I wish that I could cry, fall upon my knees, find a way to lie ’bout a home I’ll never see.” In the revamped version, he asks to “find a way to fly, to a home I will soon see.”

Writing about the song on his website, Ondrasik said the hostage families’ strength and perseverance “while enduring over seventeen months of unimaginable torment and devastation, often seems Superhuman.”

In a music video released Monday, the Grammy-nominated artist can be seen performing the ballad in a studio and playing the piano that stands in the middle of Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square. The clip also shows Alon’s brother Ronen playing the piano at Hostages Square, flanked by their mother Idit and friends of the hostage. The video is interspersed with footage of Alon himself playing piano, as well as a photo of him aged 6 wearing a Superman costume.

“This is for Alon, all the hostages and their families. May they be home soon,” says Ondrasik at the start of clip, kissing the military-style dog tag that has been adopted by hostage families in the public campaign for their loved ones’ release.

Ondrasik has previously highlighted the hostages’ plight with the pro-Israel ballad “OK,” in which he sings, “We are not okay.”

“The fact that we’re still talking about this is an outrage of humanity,” he told Fox News on Monday.

The artist said he was inspired to revamp “Superman” because of the similarity between Israel’s trauma after the Hamas onslaught and the American experience after Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked and crashed two planes into Manhattan’s World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, killing nearly 3,000 people.

Amid first responders’ heroism during the Al-Qaeda attack, “Superman,” which had been released the previous year, took on new meaning and gained new popularity. Ondrasik performed it repeatedly for those still handling the fallout from the attack.

When searching for a way to commemorate the victims of the Hamas onslaught, Ondrasik told Fox News, “it became very clear that ‘Superman’ should be the song… for Israel, October 7 is their 9/11.”

Alon Ohel and his mother Idit, pictured before October 7, 2023 (Courtesy)

Ondrasik, who is not Jewish, said “one does not have to be Jewish to support Idit, her family, Israel. One merely needs to be human, have a heart, have a soul.”

Idit Ohel, who has described her son as “the boy whose piano is his second home,” told the New York Post on Wednesday that “music has a way of getting to people.”

“Music helps people connect,” she said. “Connect to the situation that Alon is in.”

In a tearful interview with Israeli television on February 9, Idit Ohel said she had just been told by recently returned hostages that her son “has shrapnel in his eye, he has shrapnel in his shoulder, he has shrapnel in his arm.”

Ronen Ohel, brother of hostage Alon Ohel, plays the piano that stands at Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square with their mother Iditi seated beside him, surrounded by Alon’s friends, in a screen grab from the music video for Five for Fighting’s revamped version of his 2000 song ‘Superman,’ published April 14, 2025.

“Alon was bound in chains, this entire time, and he had almost no food — at most one pita a day, over a very, very, very long time, more than a year,” she said.

“And not just him — everyone who was with him: Or Levy and Eli Sharabi,” she added, naming two hostages who had returned from captivity visibly emaciated.

Levy and Sharabi were released as part of the first phase of the Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal earlier this year, which saw 33 Israeli hostages return home, as well as five Thai nationals not included in the original deal.

The first phase expired on March 2 amid Israel’s refusal to negotiate the second phase, which would have required a full IDF withdrawal from Gaza. On March 18, Israel resumed hostilities in the Strip.

Alon Ohel is one of 24 hostages still believed to be alive in Gaza, who had been slated for release in the deal’s second phase. All are young men abducted on October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel to kill some 1,200 people and take 251 hostages, sparking the war in Gaza.

The remains of 35 hostages confirmed dead are also being held in the Strip, including a soldier killed fighting in the 2014 Gaza War.