Oct. 7 Hostages Reveal the Music That Helped Them Hold On

Much has been said and written about the hostages who survived Oct. 7, the day in 2023 when Hamas terrorists systematically murdered, assaulted, and abducted 1,219 people — of 21 different nationalities — in areas of Israel neighboring the Gaza Strip. The 250 hostages who lived to tell described horrors, crippling fear, abuse (mental, physical, and sexual), and loneliness. And upon their return, many have pointed to music as a tool they used to cope during captivity.

“My body is stamped with music,” says Moran Stella Yanai, a 40-year-old Israeli jewelry designer who was taken hostage while fleeing the Nova music festival. “I ran for five hours,” she tells Rolling Stone, recalling how she dodged bullets, saw friends gunned down, ducked under brush, and evaded capture twice by convincing terrorists that she wasn’t Jewish. Yanai, who is of Moroccan and Egyptian descent, spoke some Arabic and wore a necklace that spelled “Stela” in Arabic letters.

But the third time, she was caught, loaded onto a jeep with her head covered, and driven into Gaza, where, she says, she was sold to Hamas. Yanai counted being transferred 11 times and held in five different apartments. She believes her captors treated her more harshly because of her Middle Eastern heritage, calling her a traitor and a spy, and vowing she’d never return home alive. It was a time of absolute despair.

All the while, Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” served as her “mantra, prayer, and roadmap.” The 1969 song is a favorite childhood memory, conjuring pictures in her mind of listening to the radio with her mother on Saturdays. “When I hear the song, I’m home,” says Yanai. “It’s my safe space.”

Yanai would play the Frank Sinatra classic in her head. “I’d think: ‘My way, I’ll do it my way,’” she says. “Every time I was being abused, I sang to myself, ‘And now the end is near, so I face my final curtain,’ and found the strength to go on.… You disassociate to survive the situation. You go out to a different place, travel in your head somewhere else.… The scariest thing is to lose faith. When you lose your faith, you’re done.”

For Doron Steinbrecher, who was kidnapped from her home on Kibbutz Kfar Aza and held for 471 days, having sporadic access to a radio became a lifeline. “Music helped us keep a small portion of our sanity,” she says. “Being able to listen to even a little bit of radio and catching some music from home really helped me sustain a connection to reality.”

One day, she caught a snippet of the electro-dance song “Disconnect Me,” by Israeli artists Netta Barzilai and Kfir Tzafrir, written about the Nova festival, which saw 378 attendees lose their lives. “The song touched my soul and accompanied us a lot in the tunnels,” says Steinbrecher, who was imprisoned with Karina Ariev and Daniella Gilboa. “I felt the song described exactly how I felt in that situation — that everything felt like a bad dream, and how I wished someone would wake us up from this nightmare, or just make it all stop.”

Steinbrecher would occasionally ask Gilboa to serenade her whenever she needed a boost. But singing above ground was risky, particularly for women, as it’s haram (forbidden by Islamic law) for a female to sing in public. Nevertheless, Yanai was so driven by desperation for food or water, she threw caution to the wind and began to chant “Tamally Ma’ak” [“Always with You”], a popular Arabic song, to one of her captors. “He was shocked,” she recalls, “but he came back, and said ‘Sing it again.’”

Music became her currency for survival. When Yanai sang for him, he smuggled her food. But it also reminded her that she had agency even in the depths of darkness. “I’m not a victim, and don’t ever portray me as a victim,” she says. “I want to believe that there is humanity in every person, and all we need to do is to find the right button to make it work.”

“A song that connects you to home can be like a rope that can help you climb out of a deep pit to something higher,” says psychologist Glenn Cohen, a debrief-team leader for survivors of Oct. 7 tasked with documenting the hostages’ experiences (a book of his findings, Surviving and Thriving After Trauma, is due out this year). With more than a quarter of the hostages abducted from the Nova festival, music was essential to survival, he adds, “whether they imagined it, sang it, or heard it on a nearby radio.”

For 24-year-old childhood friends Guy Gilboa Dalal and Evyatar David, both kidnapped from Nova, songs by hard-rock band Avenged Sevenfold (A7X) helped them survive two years of brutality. “[It’s as if] they wrote songs like ‘Buried Alive,’ ‘MIA’, and ‘Save Me’ for us,” says Dalal, detailing how they were bound, gagged, closely monitored, and sexually violated by their Hamas captors, particularly during the first eight months.

“When we were being abused, we’d take an album from Avenged Sevenfold and we’d disconnect and close our eyes,” adds David. “We were singing in our heads and playing guitar parts in our mouths — running from reality, so we felt only the music.”

Among their all-time A7X favorites is the song “Gunslinger,” introduced to Dalal by his older brother, Gal. During a hostage-release last February, Dalal and David were forced to watch others (including Omer Shem-Tov, with whom they were held) return home while they were detained in a nearby van, their agonizing disappointment filmed and distributed by Hamas. “The song is about a soldier fighting a war and missing home,” says Dalal. “I told Omer to send a message to my brother: ‘Gunslinger.’” It wasn’t a militaristic signal. Rather, it referenced lyrics that resonated with Guy, and that Gal later tattooed on his leg: “The stars in the night, they lend me their light/To bring me closer to heaven with you.”

After Dalal and David were released, along with the last 18 living hostages in October, A7X’s lead singer, M. Shadows, sent them a welcome-home message, for which he received some backlash once the video went public. Shadows defended the gesture, telling Rolling Stone, “To me, that video is just a human doing something for another human.… It really is about two human beings that have been through hell. And if we can’t agree on that, it’s really hard to agree on anything.” (A7X had performed in Israel multiple times, and two of their fans, whom the band knew well, were killed on Oct. 7.)

In December, the three met for the first time. “We couldn’t believe it,” says Dalal. “This was our favorite vocalist since we were little.” Adds David, “I felt like I was on drugs.”

Alon Ohel, a 24-year-old pianist of dual Serbian and German citizenship, had a similar full-circle moment. “Music has been my lifeline until today,” says Ohel, who also attended Nova, and was snatched from a shelter along with Hersh Golberg-Polin. “Music helped me get through the nightmare … and rise above.”

Held in an apartment for his first 52 days, he would hum Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine” to himself, a track that took on new meaning in the pitch-black of the tunnels, where he was eventually relocated. Sometimes, he’d imagine the Police’s “Roxanne” to rev himself up.

But his most constant companion was “Shir LeLo Shem,” or “A Song With No Name,” by Israeli artist Yehudit Ravitz, and in particular the verse “For my song is a leaf in the wind/Faded out, forgotten/It’s the soft light opening in my nights/It is you who walks towards me.”

Knowing the song’s significance to her son, Ohel’s mother, Idit, invited artists to cover it. She also had the idea to bring a yellow piano to Tel Aviv’s Hostage Square, with the message “You Are Not Alone,” a play on her son’s name, inscribed. She even organized a live concert at kibbutz Zikim, near the border, hoping Ohel might hear the high-decibel speakers in Gaza.

He didn’t because he was underground, but after hostage Eli Sharabi, who became like a father figure to Ohel in captivity, was released, he reported that Ohel constantly hummed “A Song With No Name.” The singer Yehudit Ravitz was so moved, she recorded a special version of it just for him. And a month after his return, Ohel himself played the song at Hostage Square.

“I was alone,” says Ohel, who sustained an eye injury and reported being starved, chained, beaten, and sexually assaulted during his 738 days as a hostage. And though he knows the road to physical and emotional recovery is long, he’s determined “to conquer the world with goodness and music.”

He’s currently rehearsing for a concert planned for Feb. 9 in Tel Aviv, where he’ll be performing with an array of Israeli artists, among them fellow survivors of Oct. 7. “Music is an international language,” he says. “It presents hope and happiness. [I want] to tell the world that they didn’t win. I’m winning right now.”