Freed hostage Yosef Haim Ohana, who was released from Hamas captivity after 738 days, on Wednesday published footage of his abduction, in a post marking three years since he was kidnapped during the October 7 massacre.
Alongside the footage, Ohana shared a personal post on Instagram in which he reflected on the moment he was kidnapped, the two years he spent in captivity, and his struggle to rebuild his life since returning home.
"Today I look, for dozens and perhaps hundreds of times, at the expression on that frightened child’s face," Ohana wrote. “At that curious look asking: What will happen to my life? What happens now? What will happen in the future? And where am I going?"
"I try to understand where that curious child disappeared to. The child who believed there was only good in the world. Who believed there was no evil and no hatred. Who believed that just as he loved everyone, everyone loved him."
In the post, Ohana addressed the person he had been that day and tried to put into words what he would have wanted to tell himself in the first moments after his abduction: "Yosef, maybe someone else is kidnapping you now, but the day will come when your life will be in your own hands. The day will come when you will have the opportunity to take yourself to the place where you want to be."
But, he wrote, wrote, "There was a year when I was free from the people who kidnapped me, but I was not free from myself."
"Maybe this moment, this day, is the moment when you need to take yourself and your life into your own hands. Because my life is in my hands."
Ohana also addressed the changes he underwent as a result of his abduction and captivity, stressing that he does not seek to ignore what happened or act as though nothing had occurred.
"Because it happened," he wrote. "It was real. And it is part of what brought me here."
"Precisely because I saw that hatred exists, and that evil exists, it made me choose a place without hatred. To choose love again, because I saw what hatred is. To choose good, because I saw what evil is."
Ohana wrote that today he is "in my strongest place, without fear, without hatred, without anger. In a clean place," and thanked G-d for leaving him, as he described it, with "a clean heart" that he can shape anew.
"So yes, Yosef, today you are being kidnapped again, October 7, 2026, only today the kidnapper is the one who loves you most," he wrote.
Concluding his post, Ohana wrote, "I know this is who I am, and it will not change. And when I choose to give to someone else, I am actually choosing myself again and again. I love you, child. I simply love you!"