Noa Argamani

The video was twelve seconds long and it broke the world open. Noa Argamani, twenty-five years old, is on the back of a motorcycle, arms outstretched, screaming. A man on a second motorcycle holds her boyfriend Avinatan Or, who reaches toward her. They are being taken in different directions. The footage, captured on 7 October 2023 at the Nova music festival in the Negev desert, became the single most recognisable image of the hostage crisis — shared hundreds of millions of times, printed on posters, projected onto buildings, carried at rallies from Tel Aviv to New York.

Noa had gone to the festival with Avinatan to dance. The Nova festival, a celebration of trance music and community, was held near Kibbutz Re'im, close to the Gaza border. When Hamas militants breached the fence in the early hours of October 7, the festival became one of the deadliest sites of the attack. At least 364 people were killed. Noa and Avinatan were among dozens taken hostage.

For the next eight months, Noa was held in Gaza. Her mother, Liora Argamani, who was battling terminal brain cancer, made public appeals for her daughter's release — appearances that added an almost unbearable dimension of urgency to an already desperate situation. Liora wanted to see her daughter one more time before she died.

On 8 June 2024, Israeli special forces conducted a rescue operation in the Nuseirat refugee camp, extracting Noa and three other hostages — Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv. The operation, which Israel described as daring and successful, also killed over 270 Palestinians in Nuseirat, including many civilians, according to Gaza health officials. The rescue and the carnage it produced became twin symbols of the war's impossible moral geometry.

Noa was reunited with her mother. The photographs of their embrace — Liora in a wheelchair, Noa kneeling beside her — circled the globe as images of joy. Liora died four months later, in October 2024, having seen her daughter's return.

Avinatan Or, Noa's boyfriend, remained in captivity. His fate, and the fates of the remaining hostages, continued to hang over every negotiation. Noa's story — the abduction, the captivity, the rescue, the reunion, the loss — contained the full spectrum of human experience compressed into a single year. She survived. Many others did not. The twelve-second video that began her ordeal remains one of the defining documents of October 7.