The family of hostage Yosef-Chaim Ohana received a sign of life from him after the three hostages were released on Saturday, Hannah Mastronov, his aunt, said Wednesday.
“We have a clear indication that he is alive,” she told Ynet.
“Yosef-Chaim is a strong man, but even his strength has limits,” Mastronov said.
Ohana, 24, from Kiryat Malachi, was kidnapped from the Supernova music festival during the October 7 massacre.
He attended the festival after his friend Daniel Sharabi invited him and a few other people to celebrate Ohana’s going-away party before his trip to the US for a pilot’s course.
What happened to Ohana at the festival?
In an interview with The Jerusalem Post in New York, Sharabi said he had wanted to go to the festival in the morning, but Ohana wanted to go at night, so they went at night.
At 6:30 a.m., the music stopped at the festival as the air-raid sirens sounded, Sharabi said. When they started to leave, they saw a girl having a panic attack. Being that they both served together as medics in the Givati Brigade, they stopped to help her. Two of their friends ran to their car and started packing up, he said.
Ohana and Sharabi both helped anyone they saw who was wounded by gunfire and took them to paramedics to get proper treatment, Ohana’s mother told Ynet. “They tried to run toward the main road, but then they saw that they were being fired at by RPGs,” she said. “Yosef-Chaim ran to the left, and his friend ran to the right and hid under a car.”
Sharabi said: “I saw him stand up behind a car. He popped up [and] went down. He was shot by an RPG.”The next time Sharabi saw Ohana was in a video Hamas posted. It showed the terrorists kidnapping Ohana and bringing him to Gaza.