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Friday, July 31, 2026
‘This will be your grave’: Ex-hostage Evyatar David recounts harrowing video one year later
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Former hostage Evyatar David, who was filmed pale and emaciated in a video where he said he was digging his own grave in a Hamas tunnel in Gaza, recounts the experience one year after the video was filmed.
The footage, released in early August last year and filmed a few days prior, sparked outcry and became one of the most harrowing images of the plight of the hostages kidnapped by Hamas in the terror group’s October 7, 2023, attack.
In the video, a skeletal David described how he had not eaten for a few days, held a shovel and dug a pit in a tunnel.
“This is the grave I think I’m going to be buried in,” he said in the video. “Time is running out. You are the only ones who can end this.”
Speaking to Channel 12’s Uvda program today, David recalls smelling food being eaten by his captors as they took him to film the video.
“They tell me, come, we’re going somewhere else for a moment,” he recalls. “On the way, we pass by their big room… I was blindfolded, and I remember the smell of tea they’re preparing and cakes, and hear them chewing. And a skeleton is walking by them now, and they’re enjoying cake and tea.”
His captors then showed him a pit and instructed him to dig, he recalls.
“Then we get to this place, and I see a half-dug pit, and they say, ‘Here, take this, here’s a shovel, go in, this will be your grave,” he recalls. “I dug this grave. It was close to impossible to do physically. I told myself in my head, it could be that if I’m really going to die, I’ll go lay down in this pit.”
He adds, “Think of what it is to dig your own grave. Maybe I am going to die of hunger?”
David, who was kidnapped from the Nova music festival, was released in October along with the rest of the surviving hostages upon the signing of a ceasefire deal in Gaza.
"הולך לידם שלד כרגע – והם מתפנקים על עוגה ותה": אביתר דוד מספר לראשונה על מאחורי הקלעים של הסרטון ההוא מהמנהרות – ועל רגעי האימה שלא מרפים ממנו. הנה הקטע מכתבתה של @GaliGnt ששידרנו הערב: pic.twitter.com/rQ6XVhTNdl
— עובדה (@Uvda_tweet) July 30, 2026
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