Freed hostage Omer Wenkert, who returned to Israel after 505 days in Hamas captivity, spoke for the first time to Channel 12 News about his kidnapping on October 7th and his time in Hamas captivity.
By Rachel Avraham
Freed hostage Omer Wenkert, who returned to Israel after 505 days in Hamas captivity, spoke for the first time to Channel 12 News about his kidnapping on October 7th and his time in Hamas captivity. On October 7, 2023, Omer Wenkert (22) went to dance with his close friend Kim at the Nova Music festival, Israel Hayom reported. According to the report, when the terrorist attack began, they tried to escape.
According to the report, Omer texted his parents during the attack while he was in a bomb shelter. At 7:01 a.m., he wrote to them, “God, missiles above my head,” and shortly after added, “Damn, there are shots here, Mom.” He reported hearing explosions, and when asked if he was okay, he replied, “No.” He then added, “I’m dying from fear.”
Throughout the day, it became clear that Kim had been murdered, and Omer was kidnapped to the Gaza Strip, Israel Hayom added. According to the report, his family discovered this from a video circulated by Hamas, showing him lying in a truck, surrounded by terrorists, with one particularly painful image – where he is handcuffed with both hands, almost completely naked.
Shortly after the kidnapping, his mother, Niva Wenkert, told Israel Hayom: “We saw pictures of him alive and well. My son Omer is sick with colitis. There are medications he takes regularly. There is a danger if he doesn’t receive his medication. I’m calling on Hamas – it’s on your heads if children and the elderly don’t receive their medications. It’s on your heads.”
Upon his release, Omer recalled what happened on October 7 in his Channel 12 interview: “”At six thirty, when the red alert and all the rocket fire started, that’s when we started racing towards the exit. We started driving, we immediately reached the Re’im junction, I saw a bomb shelter on the right, and I said to her, ‘Come on, stop here.’ We stopped, we went in, there were maybe 10 people there at that point. Mom also called, asking, ‘Where are you?’ ‘I’m at the bomb shelter in Re’im, everything is fine, the alarms will stop soon, I’ll wait for it to calm down and we’ll leave.'”
“Slowly, more and more people arrived at the shelter, and it wasn’t until around seven o’clock that we began to realize that there were terrorists, that there was an infiltration of terrorists. [We thought] that a breach or two had opened, and that in the kibbutzim and the towns that are very close to the fence, there was a squad of three or four terrorists and in a moment the IDF would arrive, neutralize them. You don’t imagine that anyone would reach Re’im, it’s almost five kilometers from the border. Then the shooting started, really, an orchestra of bangs, an orchestra, never-ending, long minutes, dozens, and not a single second that it even calmed down. What I remember is that the last time I saw on the clock was 7:29, and at the exact same second that I read it, someone says, ‘Come in, come in, there are terrorists here.’ I hear Allahu Akbar, the crack of a grenade inside the shelter and everyone ducks. Explosion,” he said.
Omer knew that some of those hiding with him had already been “burned alive,” adding that he made the decision to use their bodies to shield himself. “I didn’t want to get shot or hit by another grenade. I tried to bury my head under the bodies, but every explosion moved them,” he told MSN.
“You just pray, there’s nothing you can do. You say, ‘Well… this is probably the end,'” he said, recounting how the terrorists tried to flush them out by setting a fire. “It started to get hot and the smoke went into the shelter, and then someone yelled from the entrance, ‘Listen, they’re burning us.’ Before that, there was hysteria, people were screaming, but as soon as they started burning us, it became quiet, there was silence in the shelter. I’m starting to suffocate a little, lots of smoke, they also threw grenades with certain substances that suffocated us.”
“My parents don’t deserve to receive my burnt body. I refuse to die like this. If I die, I die outside—on my feet.” Omer told himself. A young woman whose name he does not know or if she survived saved his life by repelling a grenade thrown by the terrorists, Arutz Sheva reported. “I picked myself up, let some blood flow to my legs, because they just weren’t working for me, and then I walked through the fire, got out, waited, ‘Come on, come on.’ Then I saw, I think, seven or eight people standing about 10 meters away from me, and one of them said, ‘We’re not shooting, come on.’ I said, OK, I’m being kidnapped, it’s happening, I’m being kidnapped now. I saw them starting to come to me, I peed in my pants.”
‘They sat me on the floor, tied my legs too, and then my legs to my hands. They literally took my legs, put them on the van and lifted me up and we started driving. Within 10 minutes, a little less, I saw the fence was completely breached, high, I saw myself going inside, and I realized that this was it, they wouldn’t save me here anymore. At some point you get a little closer to populated areas, where there are a lot of people, you start to see a lot of people above you, and bricks, and rods, and everything that can be hit, and children on your shoulders, three-year-old children on their father’s shoulders beating you,” he told Arutz Sheva.
Until the 53rd day, he was imprisoned with other hostages, Arutz Sheva added. “I was alone from the 53rd day until the 250th day to be exact, which is 197th days. I filled my day with things that made me feel good. I thought about certain things regularly. I would talk out loud for two hours a day. I don’t know, silence can really drive me crazy, and it was silent underground, very quiet. So I spoke out loud, to myself. Whatever you think, speak. It helped me a lot.”
He stated that he received three dates in the morning, half a pita at night, and half a liter of water for two people as their daily food rations. Omer added that his birthday “present” was being “brutally beaten with an iron rod,” but that he “looked the terrorist straight in the eyes” and “refused to show weakness.” According to the Times of Israel, Omer lost 30 kilograms (66 pounds) while in captivity and never received any medical treatment for colitis, a condition he had prior to being taken hostage to Gaza.
After about 200 days that Omer was alone underground, Tal Shoham, Evyatar David, and Guy Dalal joined him, Arutz Sheva noted. “They had been exposed to the media for several months, so they had a lot of information to bring me. On June 13th, it was the first time I heard the number 240 kidnapped. The first time I heard how many terrorists entered. What actions were taken there that day. I still don’t understand them; the first time I was exposed to them.”
Omer claimed that on the day of his release, when Hamas paraded him up on stage, he did not feel humiliated: “”For me, that was the victory, I finished the struggle. It did not humiliate me. I fought, I fought, I fought, I fought – and I won. I was smiling from ear to ear. I defeated the captivity.”
