As Israeli hostage turns 48, his wife is waiting for blue ticks on his posts

When Omri Miran finally opens his WhatsApp account, he will receive a torrent of messages.

Photo by his daughters. Late at night, she reflects from his wife lichen when she lies in bed. Shooting from Israeli family life that lasted 18 painful months without it.

Lysha began to send messages three weeks after October 7, 2023, October 7, 2023, October 7, 2023 on October 7, 2023 in Kibbut Nahal Oz.

She calls the chat notes in Omra. She lost the number of messages she sent.

“My love, there are so many people you need to meet when you come back,” she wrote in late October 2023.

“Strange people who help me. Strangers who have become as close as possible.”

Three and a half months later, she posted a message to the older daughter of the couple.

“Ronnie just told you a good night in the window, as every night. She says you don’t hear it, and she doesn’t see you … You really lack in her life, and it is more difficult for her to cope with your absence.”

Friday was the birthday of Omra. His second in captivity. When he turns 48, somewhere in the gas tunnels, he will again write with fairy tales about two daughters that were still babies when he last saw them.

Published hostages say OMRI was spotted in July last year. Vera Lisha in the survival of her husband seems unwavering, but this is the most difficult time of the year. Not only the birthday of Amri, but also on the eve of Pesakh (Easter), when the Jews celebrate the biblical history of the exodus, in which Moses brought his ancestors out of slavery in Egypt.

“You know, the songs are a holiday of freedom,” says Lysha when we meet in the park near Tel -Vaviv Square.

“I don’t feel free. I don’t think anyone in Israel may feel free.”

On the Square, Omra’s birthday was celebrated on Friday.

Posters calling for release once listed the hostage age as 46. Then 47.

Danny, the father of Omra, passed both and wrote 48.

Nearby, the preparations went to the symbolic Easter or the ritual feast.

A long table with places for each of the other 59 hostages, which is still in the gas (24 are considered alive) was installed.

The Square is full of symbols: the gas tunnel layout, the tents representing the Nova Music Festival, where hundreds were killed.

Along with the goods to support families and “virtual reality hostage experience”, all this is part of the collective effort to maintain the difficult position of the disappeared in society and maintain political pressure on the Israeli government.

Licha and her daughters have not yet returned to the house where family life was torn within a few traumatic hours, 18 months ago.

But lichen says that he occasionally returns to Nahal Oz to communicate with her husband.

Kibbut is only 700 m from the gas border. It’s as close as she can get to Omra.

“I feel it there,” she says. “I can talk to him.”

After the cessation of fire came into force in mid -January, the border was quiet. Lysha made her hope, though she knew that the age of Omra means he would not be one of the first to be released.

But the ceasefire ended only two months later. Now the border zone – which Israelis calls the “gas pocket” – again echoes with the sounds of the war, respecting the deepest fears of all hostages.

“I was horrified,” she says of her last trip.

Lysha cautiously does not condemn his government, as in some hostage families. But she says that when it was clear that the war resumed, it is “really angry.”

When the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Hungary Victor Orban last week, he published that two men were discussing a “Hungarian hostage”, a link to a double Israel-Hungarian nationality of Omra.

For Lishay he hid.

“I was very, it is very difficult to see it,” she says. “There is a name in Omra. He’s not just a hostage.”

In the message of Easter, delivered on Friday, Netanyahu again promised to the families that the hostages would return, and Israel’s enemies would be defeated.

The last days have seen conversations about another transaction to cease fire, but it does not feel inevitable.

“The last time it happened,” says Lysha, citing the first ceasefire transaction in November 2023, “we waited for more than a year for another agreement. So now we will wait another year? They can’t survive there. “

So far, it seems to her WhatsApp messages in OMRI are destined to remain uncompressed.

But it does not prevent her from looking for gray ticks to become blue.

“I know that if -it will happen.”