A year ago, the world watched a starving young man dig what Hamas told him would be his own grave. Reduced to skin and bone, he could barely raise the shovel in his hands.
For millions, it was a horrifying video that appeared on their screens and then vanished. For Ilay David, it was deeply personal: the young man in the footage was his older brother, Evyatar. All Ilay could do was watch helplessly from home.
Days after the video was released, the David family appealed to President Trump through the pages of this newspaper. Evyatar appeared on the cover beneath the headline, “STARVED OF HUMANITY.”
“At the time, neither of us knew if Evyatar would survive long enough to read those words,” Ilay told The Post.
Now, one year later, Evyatar is home.
“When I wrote that appeal,” Ilay said, “I was trying to save my little brother’s life, but I was also trying to hold myself together. For almost two years, I traveled wherever I believed someone might be able to help. I spoke in television studios and public squares, in Congress and at the White House.”
“I told politicians, diplomats, journalists and anyone else who would listen about Evyatar. I needed them to understand that he was not simply a face on a poster or another name on a list of hostages. He was my little brother — someone who loves music, makes people laugh and has an entire life waiting for him.”
When Hamas released the video, Ilay saw for the first time the physical toll captivity had taken on his brother.
“I had imagined hunger, fear and darkness. But nothing prepared me for the sight of his thin body. I studied his face, searching for the brother I knew inside the person Hamas had starved. His eyes were still his, but the rest of him seemed to be disappearing.”
Evyatar told The Post that Hamas forced him and fellow captive Guy Gilboa-Dalal to remove their clothes before selecting him to appear in the video. “Because I looked worse,” he said.
“As they led me to the place where they wanted to film, I passed a room that smelled of tea and cake. I could hear my captors eating as I walked past them, starving. I remember thinking that I had become a skeleton walking past men with food who had decided I did not deserve any.”
The kidnappers took Evyatar into a narrow tunnel, handed him a shovel and pointed to a small pit. He began to dig.
“My body had almost no strength left, and every movement made me feel as though I might faint. Still, I dug because a gunman was watching me.”
Ilay recalled the anguish of watching the footage. “Every instinct I had as his older brother told me to protect him,” he said. “Instead, all I could do was stare at a screen while he struggled to lift a shovel. I wanted to reach through it, take the shovel from his hands and put my arms around him. I wanted to give him food and tell him that we had never stopped fighting for him.”
Unable to do any of that, Ilay focused on making sure the world watched — and understood how little time Evyatar might have had left, even as he feared it could already be too late.
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Then, on October 13, 2025, Evyatar was freed, and the brothers were reunited.
“After more than two years of seeing his face on posters, screens and newspaper pages, he was standing in front of me,” Ilay said. “I could touch him. I could hear his voice. For so long, I had been afraid to imagine that moment too clearly. My little brother had come home.”
“There is no language big enough for the relief of getting him back. In those first moments, all the fear I had carried collided with a kind of joy I had never known before. I held him and did not want to let go.”
Ilay knows the years stolen from Evyatar can never be restored, and that his brother cannot simply be shielded from the memories of what he endured.
“I once believed bringing Evyatar home would be the end of our nightmare. I understand now that returning home is the beginning of learning how to live again. It can be painful and complicated, but it is also filled with moments we once feared we would never have.”
“When people speak to me now,” said Evyatar, “they sometimes talk as though I have returned from the dead. I know they mean it with love, but I find it difficult to hear because I was alive every second. Even when my body was failing, I wanted to live more than I had ever wanted anything.”
I thought about my family constantly. I pictured their faces and tried to imagine what they were doing. I wondered whether they knew where I was and whether they understood how little time I might have left.”
When asked whether he ever thought about what his family was up to while he was captive, Evyatar said, “I had no idea that he had put his own life aside and was traveling around the world saying my name.
“My captors told me that nobody cared and that Israel had forgotten us. Only after I came home did I begin to understand how hard my brother had fought and how many doors he had knocked on for me. While I was trying to find the strength to survive one more day, Ilay was making sure the world did not become comfortable with leaving me there.”
The scars are still fresh. “I am free now, but freedom has not erased captivity. There are nights when I close my eyes and find myself back inside the tunnel. The young man holding the shovel is still part of me, but he is not and will never be the only part of me. I am also the person who came home, returned to the people I love and began making plans again.
He’s learning that recovery is not simple. It is a process. “It is eating with my family, listening to music and laughing with my brother and sister again. It is discovering that life continued to wait for me, even when I was not sure I would live to return to it.”
The two brothers know they cannot go back to the people they were before October 7. “What happened will always be with us,” Ilay says, “but so will the love that carried us through it and the life we still have ahead of us.”
Perhaps the clearest image of that life came at Ilay’s wedding on August 6. The young man whom Hamas had forced to dig his own grave was standing beside his brother with a guitar, escorting him as he went to be married. Surrounded by family, friends, music and joy, celebrating a new beginning.
That is the image the brothers want the world to remember.
Not the grave Hamas forced Evyatar to dig, but the life they failed to take from him. Not two brothers separated by captivity, but two brothers walking forward together.
