(JEWISH GROUP) In that horrific video of a man digging his own grave, Israelis are seeing something that Americans aren'

A clip from a video released by Hamas of Israeli hostage Evyatar David looking weak and malnourished. Photo by Getty Images

Just before heading to synagogue on Tisha B’Av this past Saturday night to hear Eicha, or the Book of Lamentations, I opened an email from a friend in Tel Aviv. It was titled: “Have you seen this? I didn’t feel I could share with other friends.”

I clicked and saw that my friend had added a brief note before a link: “In the video, David can be seen crossing off days on a makeshift calendar hung up on the side of an underground Gaza tunnel.”

That note did not prepare me for what I was about to see — the full propaganda film of Evyatar David, a young man who has been held hostage by Hamas since Oct. 7, 2023. The difference between seeing a still photograph and watching the entire video cannot be emphasized enough. That difference happens to be the gap between English-language and Hebrew media.

In The New York Times, you have to scroll all the way down to see the small screenshot of the 24-year-old David, but that is an entirely different experience from the nearly five-minute video most Israelis have watched, and are watching over and over.

To describe David as emaciated is also not enough.

He looked obviously and intentionally starved, for a very long time, and he was barefoot in a hot tunnel, beyond weak, and digging his grave. Just the minutes of the video were excruciating; I cannot imagine nearly two years of this. On the wall, a makeshift calendar. In the video, he detailed what he had eaten — or not eaten — each day in the month. He mentioned that there were days when he received no food; sometimes two days went with no food. As for what he did eat for the entire month?

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