The newest Hamas “sign-of-life” video runs one minute fifty-eight seconds. Long enough to watch 24-year-old Evyatar David – once a lanky kite-surfer from Kfar Saba – stand shirtless in a Gaza tunnel, bones jutting under parchment skin, and whisper that he has been ordered to dig his own grave.
A makeshift calendar hangs on the tunnel wall; he crosses out squares that read ein ochel – “no food.” Every square is another day of calculated starvation.
David was kidnapped from the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, when he was 22. Two weeks later, The Jerusalem Post visited the family’s apartment.
Ilay, 26, and Ye’ela, 18, sat on their brother’s unmade bed and tried to describe him to a nation suddenly obsessed with hostage posters. The Post’s photographer Chen Schimmel captured them in this exact position, on Evyatar’s bed. “He loves to meet people from all over the world,” they said, holding up photos of Evyatar backpacking in Peru and teaching surf camps for special-needs kids.
A year on, in October 2024, Ilay told the Media Line that “Evyatar brightens our lives and those of everyone around him.” Today, the only light he emits is the harsh tunnel bulb that exposes every rib.
The clip obliterates the polite euphemism food insecurity. It shows a body that has lost perhaps a third of its weight; cheeks collapsed, eyes swimming in dark hollows. It answers the question some commentators still ask – whether the hostages receive “adequate rations” – with a silent X across an empty dinner square. And it exposes the double standard of influencers who recite UN hunger statistics but scroll past a Jew forced to shovel his own burial pit.
Hamas knows exactly what it is doing. Starvation is a bargaining chip; the emaciated hostage is a living press release. When pro-Palestinian hackers plastered still frames of the video onto Israeli basketball websites Friday night, Evyatar’s parents pleaded not to circulate the images. Their plea was ignored. In the upside-down moral economy of social media, hunger is compelling only when it can be weaponized against Israel.
So what do we, a society that calls itself am chofshi – a free nation – do with this obscenity? First, we look. Not to satisfy ghoulish curiosity but to burn the reality of deliberate starvation into our civic memory. Second, we banish the illusion that “more time will strengthen Israel’s negotiating position.” Time is the enemy when every tick of the clock costs a hostage another calorie he cannot spare.
Third, we reclaim the moral language. The next time a foreign editor insists on “balance,” show them Evyatar’s calendar. The next time an academic speaks of “mutually inflicted suffering,” remind them that only one side is bragging about the slow murder of captives.
Yet the column cannot end in outrage alone. It must end where the family always ends its interviews: with life. Evyatar taught himself guitar so he could lead campfire sing-alongs; he once gave his surfboard to a kid who could not afford one. Those muscles are now gone, but the person inside that starved body is still Evyatar David – Israeli, Jewish, loved.
Nine months ago, at Hostage Square, a family member told me they feared Evyatar would be “forgotten in the noise.” The tunnel video proves Hamas has not forgotten him at all; it is counting his days with malicious precision. It is we – Israeli citizens, decision-makers, Diaspora Jews – who risk forgetting that hunger has a human face and that face now stares into our cameras, pleading without words.
Bring him home before the next square on that calendar is crossed out.