One of the longest held Israeli hostages may well have been one of the luckiest.

Avinatan Or was among the last 20 living hostages to be given his freedom under President Donald Trump’s peace deal with Hamas. Fortunately, for him, Hamas never realized who they had in their hands.

On October 7, 2023, Or and his girlfriend, Noa Argamani, were among the attendees at the Nova music festival. Both were taken captive. One of the most widely recognized photos of the attacks that day showed a terrorized Argamani being dragged away on the back of a motorbike.

Argamani and Or were separated that day and not reunited until after the latter’s release this month on October 13. She had been rescued more than a year earlier by Israeli commandos on June 8, 2024.

Unbeknownst to Hamas, however, was that Or was a member of an elite Israeli Defense Force (IDF) unit. The unit, once known as the Rimon Reconnaissance unit, had been incorporated in 2018 into Israel’s Commando Brigade. It conducted very secretive operations. So secret were they that no information is even available about its activities.

For the entire time Or was held hostage, Israel would disclose nothing about him while he, obviously, offered nothing about what he did. Or did attempt to escape at one point. He was beaten and remained handcuffed to a cage for doing so. He spent his entire time in captivity living in various tunnels. Although never starved, food was always scarce.

Or’s father reported that his guards had relatives who had been killed during IDF bombings and, had they known his son’s background, he would have paid a hefty price.

Or’s miraculous survival was a bit of an intelligence coup for Israel as well. As a reconnaissance operative, he was trained to note details while in captivity that civilian hostages would never have known to mentally record. Despite spending his entire captivity underground, there is undoubtedly much he was still able to pick up on and report to Israeli intelligence.

Argamani and Or have been reunited and now say they are looking forward to “healing together.” Meanwhile, Hamas is undoubtedly very unhappy about learning they had a crown jewel of intelligence in their possession and never knew it.

Image: רונאלדיניו המלך / IDF Spokesperson's Unit, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, unaltered.