Omer Shem Tov was dancing with friends at the Nova Music Festival in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists launched a devastating attack, killing hundreds and loading Shem Tov and dozens of others onto the backs of pickup trucks bound for Gaza.

The 20-year-old Israeli spent the next 505 days in Hamas captivity, serving as a slave in the terrorist group’s elaborate tunnels until “fear” filled their eyes on Nov. 5, 2024 — when President Donald Trump won the presidential election, he told Fox News Digital.

Shem Tov recounted his months living in Hamas’ captivity in Gaza as war raged between the terrorist group and Israel during a recent Zoom interview with Fox News Digital. He was released from captivity in February and traveled to the U.S. shortly afterward to meet with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office.

“As soon as Trump was elected, I saw the fear in their eyes,” Shem Tov said. “They knew that everything on ground is gonna change, that something else is gonna happen, and they were scared. They were very scared.”

AMERICAN-ISRAELI HELD HOSTAGE IN GAZA FOR OVER 580 DAYS SENDS MESSAGE TO HAMAS: ‘I’LL GIVE YOU HELL’

Shem Tov said that for roughly the last five months of his captivity, he lived in Hamas’ tunnel system beneath the Gaza Strip, where he was worked mercilessly.

“I was digging for them, and I was cleaning for them, and I was moving around bombs from place to places, and (carrying) food. I can tell you,  just so you know, crazy amounts of food. Amounts of food that I’ve never seen before,” he recounted. 

Shem Tov learned about the American presidential election from his Hamas captors, who watched Al Jazeera on a TV kept in the tunnels.

“The last five months, the terrorists, they brought TV to the tunnel and most of the time they watched Al Jazeera. That’s the only thing they watch. And … they wouldn’t let me watch TV, yeah, but sometimes I would overhear the TV,” he said.

He said he overheard the terrorists discussing the election and “how they want Kamala to win.”

Once the election was decided, Shem Tov said, the terrorists changed the way they treated him, even offering him more food. He said he mostly survived on small biscuits throughout his captivity, despite Hamas controlling large amounts of food.

IDF ANNOUNCES TRANSFER OF DECEASED ISRAELI HOSTAGE REMAINS THROUGH RED CROSS

“So everything changed,” he said of how Hamas changed following Trump’s win. “The amount of food that I got changed. The way they treated me changed. I could see just them preparing for something bigger.”

Shem Tov recounted that he spent his 21st birthday in captivity, just weeks after he was first kidnapped. He said that between Oct. 7 and Oct. 30 of 2023, he did “not cry once,” but that he felt a swell of emotion when remembering his family on his birthday. 

“At my birthday, it was the thirty-first of October, it was the first time that I broke down, I cried. It’s for me, thinking of my family, that’s something that really hits me. Understanding that my family, they’re back home, they’re safe, yeah, but but they have to worry about me. … They don’t know if if I’m alive, if I’m starving … they had no idea. And I can tell you that while I was there, I suffered. I truly suffered. I was abused, I was starved in the most extreme way,” he said. 

Since his release, Shem Tov has praised Trump for his role in freeing the hostages and pursuing peace in the Middle East. He told Fox News Digital that he had long heard Trump’s name and knew he was a “big supporter of Israel,” but had largely stayed out of politics before his kidnapping.

There is currently a cease-fire between Israel and Gaza after Trump rolled out a 20-point plan to secure peace in the region in September. The plan included the release of all the hostages. All hostages have been released from Hamas captivity except one, slain police officer Ran Gvili, whose body remains in Gaza.

TRUMP MEETS FREED ISRAELI HOSTAGES, CALLS THEM ‘HEROES’ IN WHITE HOUSE CEREMONY

Shem Tov was among a handful of hostages who traveled to the White House to meet with Trump earlier in 2025, where he relayed that he and other hostages are “so grateful to him.”

“I personally told him that me and my family, and I would say all of Israel, believe that he was sent by God to release those hostages and to help Israel,” Shem Tov recounted of what he told Trump during his meeting in February. “And he made that promise. He made that promise, he said that he will bring back all the hostages.”

For Shem Tov, freedom after captivity has meant keeping close ties with fellow hostage survivors.

“I would say they become like my family, like my brothers and sisters. We have many group chats and we see each other every once in a while and there are some who really become like brothers of mine,” Shem Tov said. 

Gavin Newsom is off and running, eyeing the White House as he enters the far turn and his final year as California governor.

The track record for California Democrats and the presidency is not a good one. In the nearly 250 years of these United States, not one Left Coast Democrat has ever been elected president. Kamala Harris is just the latest to fail. (Twice.)

Can Newsom break that losing streak and make history in 2028?

Faithful readers of this column — both of you — certainly know how I feel.

Garry South disagrees.

The veteran Democratic campaign strategist, who has been described as possessing “a pile-driving personality and blast furnace of a mouth” — by me, actually — has never lacked for strong and colorful opinions. Here, in an email exchange, we hash out our differences.

Barabak: You once worked for Newsom, did you not?

South: Indeed I did. I was a senior strategist in his first campaign for governor. It lasted 15 months in 2008 and 2009. He exited the race when we couldn’t figure out how to beat Jerry Brown in a closed Democratic primary.

I happen to be the one who wrote the catchy punch line for Newsom’s speech to the state Democratic convention in 2009, that the race was a choice between “a stroll down memory lane vs. a sprint into the future.”

We ended up on memory lane.

Barabak: Do you still advise Newsom, or members of his political team?

South: No, though he and I are in regular contact and have been since his days as lieutenant governor. I know many of his staff and consultants, but don’t work with them in any paid capacity. Also, the governor’s sister and I are friends.

Barabak: You observed Newsom up close in that 2010 race. What are his strengths as a campaigner?

South: Newsom is a masterful communicator, has great stage presence, cuts a commanding figure and can hold an audience in the palm of his hand when he’s really on. He has a mind like a steel trap and never forgets anything he is told or reads.

I’ve always attributed his amazing recall to the struggle he has reading, due to his lifelong struggle with severe dyslexia. Because it’s such an arduous effort for Newsom to read, what he does read is emblazoned on his mind in seeming perpetuity.

Barabak: Demerits, or weaknesses?

South: Given his remarkable command of facts and data and mastery of the English language, he can sometimes run on too long. During that first gubernatorial campaign, when he was still mayor of San Francisco, he once gave a seven-hour State of the City address.

Barabak: Fidel Castro must have been impressed!

South: It wasn’t as bad as sounds: It was broken into 10 “Webisodes” on his YouTube channel. But still …

Barabak: So let’s get to it. I think Newsom’s chances of being elected president are somewhere between slim and none — and slim was last seen alongside I-5, in San Ysidro, thumbing a ride to Mexico.

You don’t agree.

South: I don’t agree at all. I think you’re underestimating the Trumpian changes wrought (rot?) upon our political system over the past 10 years.

The election of Trump, a convicted felon, not once but twice, has really blown to hell the conventional paradigms we’ve had for decades in terms of how we assess the viability of presidential candidates — what state they’re from, their age, if they have glitches in their personal or professional life.

Not to mention, oh, their criminal record, if they have one.

The American people actually elected for a second term a guy who fomented a rebellion against his own country when he was president the first time, including an armed assault on our own national capitol in which a woman was killed and for which he was rightly impeached. It’s foolish not to conclude that the old rules, the old conventional wisdom about what voters will accept and what they will not, are out the window for good.

It also doesn’t surprise me that you pooh-pooh Newsom’s prospects. It’s typical of the home-state reporting corps to guffaw when their own governor is touted as a presidential candidate.

One, familiarity breeds contempt. Two, a prophet is without honor in his own country.

Barabak: I’ll grant you a couple of points.

I’m old enough to remember when friends in the Arkansas political press corps scoffed at the notion their governor, the phenomenally gifted but wildly undisciplined Bill Clinton, could ever be elected president.

I also remember those old Clairol hair-color ads: “The closer he gets … the better you look!” (Google it, kids). It’s precisely the opposite when it comes to presidential hopefuls and the reporters who cover them day-in, day-out.

And you’re certainly correct, the nature of what constitutes scandal, or disqualifies a presidential candidate, has drastically changed in the Trump era.

All of that said, certain fundamentals remain the same. Harking back to that 1992 Clinton campaign, it’s still the economy, stupid. Or, put another way, it’s about folks’ lived experience, their economic security, or lack thereof, and personal well-being.

Newsom is, for the moment, a favorite among the chattering political class and online activists because a) those are the folks who are already engaged in the 2028 race and b) many of them thrill to his Trumpian takedowns of the president on social media.

When the focus turns to matters affecting voters’ ability to pay for housing, healthcare, groceries, utility bills and to just get by, Newsom’s opponents will have a heyday trashing him and California’s steep prices, homelessness and shrinking middle class.

South: It’s not just the chattering class.

Newsom’s now the leading candidate among rank-and-file Democrats. They had been pleading — begging — for years that some Democratic leader step out of the box, step up to the plate, and fight back, giving Trump a dose of his own medicine. Newsom has been meeting that demand with wit, skill and doggedness — not just on social media, but through passage of Proposition 50, the Democratic gerrymandering measure.

And Democrats recognize and appreciate it

Barabak: Hmmm. Perhaps I’m somewhat lacking in imagination, but I just can’t picture a world where Democrats say, “Hey, the solution to our soul-crushing defeat in 2024 is to nominate another well-coiffed, left-leaning product of that bastion of homespun Americana, San Francisco.”

South: Uh, Americans twice now have elected a president not just from New York City, but who lived in an ivory tower in Manhattan, in a penthouse with a 24-carat-gold front door (and, allegedly, gold-plated toilet seats). You think Manhattan is a soupçon more representative of middle America than San Francisco?

Like I said, state of origin is less important now after the Trump precedent.

Barabak: Trump was a larger-than-life — or at least larger-than-Manhattan — celebrity. Geography wasn’t an impediment because he had — and has — a remarkable ability, far beyond my reckoning, to present himself as a tribune of the working class, the downtrodden and economically struggling Americans, even as he spreads gold leaf around himself like a kid with a can of Silly String.

Speaking of Kamala Harris, she hasn’t ruled out a third try at the White House in 2028. Where would you place your money in a Newsom-Harris throwdown for the Democratic nomination? How about Harris in the general election, against whomever Republicans choose?

South: Harris running again in 2028 would be like Michael Dukakis making a second try for president in 1992. My God, she not only lost every swing state, and the electoral college by nearly 100 votes, Harris also lost the popular vote — the first Democrat to do so in 20 years.

If she doesn’t want to embarrass herself, she should listen to her home-state voters, who in the latest CBS News/YouGov poll said she shouldn’t run again — by a margin of 69-31. (Even 52% of Democrats said no). She’s yesterday’s news.

Barabak: Seems as though you feel one walk down memory lane was quite enough. We’ll see if Harris — and, more pertinently, Democratic primary voters — agree.

A former FBI agent and COVID-era whistleblower who was recently reinstated under President Donald Trump was fired Friday, according to a report.

The FBI dismissed Steve Friend for “unprofessional conduct and poor judgment,” according to a copy of the termination letter posted on X by New York Post columnist Miranda Devine. An FBI source confirmed the firing, but would not elaborate, c biting that it is a personnel matter.

The FBI stated in the letter that Friend “participated in unauthorized interactions with the media, publicly disseminated media sources, and commented publicly on FBI matters and ongoing FBI investigations.”

HOUSE REPUBLICANS ACCUSE BIDEN’S FBI OF RETALIATING AGAINST WHISTLEBLOWER WHO EXPOSED MISCONDUCT

Friend was first suspended by the FBI in August 2022 and resigned in February of 2023. He was reinstated last September.

In the letter, the FBI stated that in November, Friend “disseminated media sources and photographs identifying an alleged subject and discussed the alleged subject on your podcast, despite the lack of credible, verifiable evidence necessary to publicly identify the subject.”

When reached for comment by Fox News Digital, Friend said his ouster was retaliation by FBI Director Kash Patel.

EX-FBI AGENTS SAY BUREAU USED INTERNAL PROBES TO PUNISH WHISTLEBLOWERS

Friend’s dismissal from the Bureau came after his attorneys at Empower Oversight Whistleblowers & Research dropped him as a client on Dec. 5. 

The non-profit organization said in a letter to Friend that he had ignored its advice by commenting publicly on FBI matters, “risking further adverse administrative action” by the Bureau.

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“In light of your apparent unwillingness to follow the free professional advice we have given you, we are even more convinced that our previously expressed inability to represent you regarding any legal matters other than your reinstatement was warranted,” the non-profit wrote. ” We are no longer willing or able to expend further time and resources representing your interests or providing counsel moving forward.”