“Let’s go sit in the sun at the café next door,” Moran writes to me. I enter the colorful neighborhood café in a student district in Beersheba and look for a secluded table with privacy and an electrical outlet. One table is already taken. It’s reserved for Noa Argamani and Avinatan Or, and it has a notebook on it. “This was ‘my’ table,” Moran says as she arrives. “They don’t seat people at this table. They brought a notebook, and people wrote to me when I wasn’t here. It was bizarre. Noa will come back, and she’ll have a notebook, too.” Moran Stella Yanai, 40, arrived at the Nova festival on Friday evening, Oct. 6. She had just returned from a trip to Thailand, and this was her first time opening a jewelry stall of her own design at such a big festival. But the atmosphere, she says, was very strange. There was a lot of movement from people, but nobody was buying anything. The vendors around her started turning off lights and joining the partygoers to dance. Moran and her friend settled into beach chairs and took out a thermos. “Almost everyone around us is doing drugs, and here we are, sitting like two old ladies, drinking tea.” The atmosphere changed only when dawn broke. “It was one of those scenes everyone couldn’t stop talking about. It really captivated us. It was one of the most beautiful sunrises I’ve seen, and I had returned just three weeks earlier from Thailand, where we had plenty of sunrises. But there was something very pure, innocent about this one, I don’t know how to explain it ... and everyone stopped. Even me. I looked at the sky and smiled. And suddenly I see two rockets rising diagonally.” Stunned, Moran couldn’t utter a word and simply kicked her friend’s leg repeatedly until she exclaimed, “What?!” Moran pointed to the sky, and her friend smiled and exclaimed, “Wow! Fireworks.” Moran screamed, “Rockets!!!” And that was it. Everyone around fell silent, the DJ stopped playing, and the nightmarish escape journey began. Along the way, Moran was captured twice and escaped, and on the third occasion, she was violently kidnapped to Gaza. She was held captive by Hamas for 54 days and nights, transferred between four houses, and some of the time she was held with other hostages, including Itay Svirsky, who was later murdered, and Noa Argamani. Moran was released on Nov. 29 in the final round of the prisoner exchange. I met her that morning and listened breathlessly to her story. It is beyond comprehension. That is exactly why I wanted to give her testimony words, lines, and colors: to illustrate, through drawings, what she went through in Hamas captivity. As of the writing of these lines, there are still 133 hostages in Gaza. Watch and read what Moran went through there, and keep them in mind. ...

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