WASHINGTON — A former Oct. 7 hostage who survived more than 16 months of Hamas captivity in the Gaza Strip will warn attendees of Turning Point USA’s America Fest conference Friday that “radical terrorist violence” has spread across the globe since that tragic day, The Post can reveal.
“This fight is bigger than Israel. It is a fight for Western civilization itself,” Omer Shem Tov, who spent 505 days in captivity before his release this past Feb. 22, is expected to say, according to a copy of his prepared remarks.
The address will note that the same evil he encountered in Gaza’s tunnels is “spreading in Africa, in Europe, and yes, even here in America.”
“What I experienced was not just a personal tragedy. It is part of a much larger fight,” Shem Tov plans to say. “We have seen these same radical terrorists commit violence in Israel, in Europe, in Australia, and even here in the United States, including the recent [Nov. 26] attack in Washington, DC, where two National Guardsmen were shot.“
“This is the evil we are fighting,” the prepared remarks add. “And that is why Turning Point USA matters. Because you see the truth. And you stand for freedom.”
“Charlie Kirk once said, ‘Israel is a civilized country. Hamas are savage animals,’” Shem Tov also plans to say. “Take it from someone who spent 505 days as their hostage. Charlie was right.”
The 2025 conference will host some of the most influential political figures and pundits on the right, including Vice President JD Vance, podcasters Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson, and current and former federal officials, lawmakers, entertainers and pastors.
It comes as some right-wing pundits and Republican lawmakers have criticized Israel and its conduct in the war against Hamas, driving a wedge between the US and its lone ally in the Middle East.
That friction came to the fore when President Trump decided to bomb Iranian nuclear sites on June 21, with Carlson claiming months before that the move “will almost certainly result in thousands of American deaths at bases throughout the Middle East, and cost the United States tens of billions of dollars.”
Neither happened — and Trump told off his detractors in the wake of the mostly successful bombings.
Shem Tov was one of many revelers kidnapped from the Nova music festival and driven into Gaza, where he was forced underground and into darkness with little water and one small meal a day — even as his tormenters forced him to carry UN-stamped food packages through their terror tunnels.
In an interview with The Post Wednesday, Shem Tov emphasized that the Israeli-Hamas war has been mischaracterized as a conflict “about the land” when really it’s “about religion” — and praised Trump for understanding that “this is not just an Israel and Gaza thing.”
Radicals in the media, global governments and on social networking platforms are also emboldening Islamic terrorists worldwide, he claimed.
“They’re trying to kill — and first of all, it’s the Jews, and after that it’s every other religion,” Shem Tov said. “So if it’s Christians and if it’s Buddhism and if it’s whatever it is, but people have to understand that this is not just an Israel and Palestinian thing. It’s a terror organization who comes after other religions.”
“That’s the problem,” he added. “People are not getting the point: It’s evil versus good.”
Shem Tov spent 54 days in captivity with a friend who had gone with him to the festival. That friend was then released, while Omer was forced into a small cell in a tunnel 120 feet below ground, unable to even stand up.
Later, Shem Tov’s captors moved him to a bigger tunnel, though no natural light was able to enter.
“It was a piece of bread a day, and slowly it got less and less and less,” he noted. “It got to a point where I had a biscuit a day, and even sometimes I had this small — two ounces — cup of dry spices a day … and I used to drink some salty water, ocean water.”
“The treatment stayed the same,” he added. “They used to spit on me. They used to curse me. They used to abuse me physically and psychologically. … I was a slave.”
Shem Tov said the only way he survived nearly two years as a hostage was learning to talk daily with God and by reading a small Torah that his captors allowed him in exchange for running their bombs and food through the tunnels.
He also said he taught himself to speak Arabic in just five months — without ever letting his captors know he could understand their conversations.
“The thing that saved me, it was by approaching God,” he explained. “I could hear tanks lying above my head and I could hear even sometimes soldiers speaking through the ventilation in Hebrew.
“And while I hear them speaking, the terrorists, they hold a gun to my head and they tell me, ‘As soon as they come in, We’re going to shoot you in the head, and they’re going to run off,’ and you just, you have to be silent.”
After a month or so, the Israeli military withdrew from the area where Shem Tov was being kept. When Hamas searched above ground, they found books written in Hebrew, including excerpts from the Torah.
One of the entries, Shem Tov recalled, recounted the Biblical story of Joseph from the book of Genesis. The story recounts how one of the Jewish prophets is sold into slavery in Egypt, only to become a key adviser to the pharaoh.
“It’s like a straight sign from God that I’m going to be just like Joseph,” he said. “I’m going to come out of the pit.”
Shem Tov has since toured college campuses and embarked on other speaking engagements, where he’s found even anti-Israel protesters shocked to hear his story.
“I was at Berkeley,” he shared. “I had this event and there were 500 people there, but I came there and most of them, they were Jews. And I told myself, ‘What am I doing here? I came here to the university where I saw those horrible videos of people protesting, screaming [about] genocide in Gaza and starvation’ … I have to do something about it.”
“So the next day in the morning, I took a table. I put this Israeli flag on it and I put up the sign: ‘I was a hostage held by Hamas for 505 days. Ask me anything,’” he recounted. “Pro-Palestinians came up to me and started talking to me.”
Shem Tov’s actions echoed those of TPUSA co-founder Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated during a speaking engagement on the campus of Utah Valley University Sept. 10.
“I wouldn’t tell you that I changed their mind,” he noted. “The pro-Palestinian … would say something and I would give him a fact. And I could see the crowd around … how they changed suddenly. They’d say, ‘Oh, I did not know this.”
“People came up to me, Muslims, by the way, they came up to me and they told me, ‘Omer, I’m sorry … I did not know that. Please forgive us,’” he went on. “I think a lot of people right now are just — they’re ignorant. They don’t know; they’re uneducated.”
“I thought that that when Israel was attacked, that the whole world would have our back,” he said of the encounter with students, many of whom protested Israel’s prosecution of the war against Hamas.
“On the 7th of October,kids were slaughtered, women were raped, houses were burned down, people were burnt inside their vehicles.”
