Life After Captivity: Rebuilding Family and Trust in Southern Israel
Released hostage Omri and his partner Lishi rebuild their lives, family, and partnership in Karmit a year after his return from 738 days in Hamas captivity.
In the courtyard of their caravan, Omri and Lishi planted a pomegranate tree—perhaps the most precise symbol of their new year: an attempt to sprout life in a new place. They now live in Karmit, but "Nahal Oz always remains home," Omri says.
In this sentence lies perhaps all the tension in which they and many other families of released hostages have been living over the past year—trying to strike roots in one place without giving up the place from which they were uprooted. Raising two daughters in a new reality without erasing the previous one, and learning anew to be a couple and a family after two years of living in completely different worlds.
And there is another sentence that manages to summarize this path. It was said in the hospital, shortly after Omri returned from captivity. Alma was half a year old when her father was kidnapped, and when he returned, she was two and a half. Standing in front of him, she said: "Abba, you came out of the picture."
"What is our place in the world"
"There is a psychologist, there is physiotherapy. It is all well and good, but these are tools, not the rehabilitation," Omri explains. "Along the way I am going through quite a few processes. For the past ten months, I have been undergoing rehabilitation at the center of Rabbi Pinter's 'Ezra LeMarpe' association in Sderot. Rehabilitation is what we do each one with themselves, with each other, as a family, trying to understand what our place in the world is now and where it is."
From his perspective, returning home and returning to life are two different things. "I think both of us were, each on their own level, in a state of 'I am alive, but I am not truly living.'"
Before he was kidnapped on October 7 for 738 days, Omri was a very present father, worked in the kibbutz, and spent time with Roni. They cooked together, traveled, rode bicycles, and went out to the fields. When he returned, he discovered that the daughters had continued to grow. "You arrive, and it is completely natural, but the little girl is not at all sure that it is real. Not sure of you. You cannot approach her at all," he relates.
It took months until the connection and trust were rebuilt. "There is also guilt, of course," he says. Alongside the guilt, he adds, there was also the realization that there is no shortcut: "This is a certain situation, and we will work to improve it, but this is exactly the rehabilitation. At first you cannot yet be the father you want to be. And then you realize, about yourself too: wait, I also don't have those strengths."
A new-old partnership
Their partnership also needed to find its place anew. Omri and Lishi have been together for about six years, two of which they lived apart. When Omri is asked what he rediscovered since returning, he speaks precisely of what did not disappear.
During the two years Omri was in captivity, Lishi had one goal. She raised the daughters, ran around the country and the world, gave interviews, met with decision-makers, and fought to bring him back. Precisely after he returned, when the goal that sustained her for two years was achieved, her own personal struggle began.
"I think it was only in the last six months that I even started dealing with this," she says. "To understand what it means to be a hostage, to see your daughter in someone else's hands, with a weapon pointed at her head."
On the first night after Omri returned, they hardly slept. They talked almost all night, trying to bridge their separate realities. Over time, they understood that there is no way to fully make up for what they missed.
"Bad people will come"
At first, the daughters also tried to tell their father everything they went through. But at a certain point, Lishi says, they too had to understand that not all of life can revolve around the missing two years. "We need to live the now," she says.
Six-year-old Roni clearly remembers October 7. Omri shares that in one conversation about Nahal Oz, when she understood that other people might rent their family home, her reaction was immediate: "But that's dangerous, bad people will come and take them."
Almost a year later, the struggle against the state for the most basic things continues to weigh on their lives. "There is a very large crisis of trust here," Omri explains. Lishi speaks about the recognition of kidnapping victims, the rights of captive survivors, and the need to investigate the failures that led to October 7.
Toward repair and change
Ahead of the elections, she does not hide her desire for change, but she also does not believe that a change of government alone will fix everything. Politics recently entered the family as well, as Dani Miran, Omri's father, decided to enter the political arena. Lishi asks to separate the state as a system from the people, expressing deep gratitude to the reservists.
Out of this year, the decision to give lectures was also born. Omri already stands before audiences, focusing mainly on mental coping. For Lishi, the joint meetings are a dialogue about the life before, during, and after—an attempt to reclaim ownership over their story.
Simultaneously, Omri is beginning to touch upon the life he had before October 7, wishing to return to his Shiatsu practice through workshops. It is not a full return, nor the end of rehabilitation, but simply another step forward.
