A Year Ago Today, Terrorists Stole My Son

My son Alon lives in an apartment in Tel Aviv with his friends. It’s not fancy, but it’s charming and warm; sometimes his little brother, Ronen, will stay there if he doesn’t want to make the journey late at night to our home north of Haifa. For more than a decade Alon has played piano, and he has an acceptance letter to Rimon School of Music. He loves to grill, but always complains to his dad that ours doesn’t work, so we bought a brand-new one a few months ago. For his twenty-third birthday this past February, everyone from around our small community came together to play music and eat hot dogs, his favorite. It’s a pretty good life.

The only problem is that my son is missing from it. We haven’t seen him for a year. 

On the morning of October 7, 2023, my son was at the Nova Music Festival. When Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, he hid in a bomb shelter with 27 people. Sixteen of them were murdered. Seven survived after hiding for six hours under a pile of bodies. Four were taken hostage: Or Levy, Eliya Cohen, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, and my son, Alon Ohel. 

Alon had gone to the festival with four friends, arriving at 5:30 in the morning. He had barely spent half an hour there when the sirens began. That same morning, at the same time, I was taking the dog for a walk, like I always do, when my father called to ask if we knew where Alon was. He said something bad was happening in the south. 

We immediately texted Alon to see if he was okay. We got a message back at 8:08 a.m.: “Everything is fine, we’re in a shelter.” We tried to call, and asked him to send pictures, but he didn’t answer. Now I know that there was no cell service inside that shelter. I suspect I got the message that everything was fine when Alon was already being dragged into the tunnels of Gaza.

We didn’t know that then, though. Nor did we know that Alon’s phone fell out of his hands or his pocket somewhere near that shelter. That morning, my daughter Inbar kept calling Alon’s phone every ten minutes. At 11:30, a young woman answered. She whispered very quietly, "Help, please send help.” And then the line went dead. 

Alon’s phone ended up at Soroka Medical Center, so my husband and his brother went to see if they could find Alon among the wounded there. A few hours later, my husband got a call from Alon’s friend, who told him what happened in the bomb shelter. At around one in the morning, my husband arrived back home and told me what he had learned. He was very direct. “Alon was kidnapped alive.” 

I had two options at that moment: get into bed and never get up again. Or fight. I chose to fight. 

“I had two options at that moment: get into bed and never get up again. Or fight,” writes Idit Ohel. “I chose to fight.” Pictured: Idit Ohel, her husband Ronen, and two of her children, Kobi and Inbar.

Since that day, we’ve blasted music into Gaza in the hopes that Alon might hear it. We’ve brought a piano—painted yellow in honor of Alon and those taken—to Hostage Square in Tel Aviv. There are yellow pianos all over the world now. I lead community meditations every week where we imagine Alon and all the other hostages being liberated and returning home. I’ve organized runs around my community; I go to protests with my husband. Through it all I talk to Alon—when I’m washing dishes, or walking the dog, or when I’m in the shower. I tell him how much I love him. I tell him that I know he has the strength to go through this. If I stop, I fear that nothing will happen, and that they will be forgotten. 

There are two videos that capture seconds of the terror my son experienced that day.

In the first one, terrorists are seen outside the shelter, throwing grenades into it one after another, while shouting at someone sitting on the ground outside. Gunshots can be heard in the background. The Hamas men throw grenade after grenade at the young men and women hiding in the shelter, but they are thrown back out—though in the video you cannot see who is deflecting them. 

Another horrific video shows Alon being dragged by his hair across the ground outside the shelter by a terrorist in plainclothes. Another, wearing camo fatigues and a green Hamas headband, helps him lift my son into a white Toyota pickup truck. A third terrorist joins in to hit him before two of the terrorists raise their guns and point them at Alon, before the camera pans back toward the shelter. There is blood on him—on his face and on his shirt—but it is hard to make out his face.

For a time, that was all we knew. Later we learned the name of the hero who deflected those grenades. He was Aner Shapiro, and he was 22 years old. He was able to throw seven grenades out of the shelter, but died when the eighth exploded in his hands. He had come to the festival with his dear friend, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who Hamas murdered after 325 days in captivity. 

Was my son Alon kept with Hersh in the tunnels? Is he with Or Levy and Eliya Cohen right now? I have no idea. And I try desperately not to think of his gruesome abduction, or how he has spent the past 365 days.

Instead I try to think about his beautiful blond hair and his green eyes. I think about how funny he is and how much he loves people. I think about how excited he would get about things, and how he would just light up—like with cars, which he’s been obsessed with since he was two years old. Or about cooking and surfing, and of course, music. I think about how I played Beethoven and Mozart for him while he was in my womb. 

I think about how, after he finished his army service and saved up some money working at a luxury hotel in the south, he decided to travel to Asia, a common destination for young Israelis. But unlike most of his friends, he did it alone. He told me, “I want to see how I can be with myself, and cope with myself.” He loved it—he did a trek in Nepal and traveled around the south of India and Sri Lanka. He met up with so many people there, new friends and old. He had a big appetite for life, and an ability to find beauty in every experience. It’s hard to find a picture of him where he’s not laughing. 

Here’s Alon playing Claude Debussy’s Clair de Lune at a recital:

Two months after my son was stolen, a few of his friends arrived at my house to give us a key to their new apartment. That’s where his room is, waiting for him. The last time I saw him, at around eleven o’clock on the night of October 6, Alon played his piano for us a bit before leaving for the festival. He played a cover of Yehudit Ravitz’s “Song Without a Name.” It was beautiful. He left the piano open and it’s been open ever since, waiting. 

After a year of the terrible, terrible conditions he has suffered, I don’t know if he will want to continue living as he did before. But if he does, it’s all waiting for him when he comes home. 

For more from the parents of the Israelis taken hostage on October 7, read “The Woman in the Hamas Video Is My Daughter” by Ayelet Levy Shachar, or watch Bari’s interview with Rachel Goldberg, the mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin.  

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