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When Miran finally opens his account in WhatsApp, he will get a mess from messages.

Photos of his daughters. Late night, he thinks of his wife deprived as she lies in bed. Photos of an Israeli family life that last 18 painful months without it.

Lichei began sending the messages three weeks after Hamas artillerymen forcibly grabbed Omri from their home in Kibbutz Nazal Oz, on October 7, 2023.

She calls the chat notes to Omry. It is lost the number of messages it has been sent.

“My love, there are so many people you will have to meet when you come back,” she wrote at the end of October 2023.

“Incredible people who help me. Strangers who have become as close as they can.”

Three and a half months later, she posted a message from the couple’s eldest daughter.

“Ronnie just told you a good night on the window like every night. She says you don’t hear her and she doesn’t see you … You really miss her life and it’s getting more difficult to cope with your absence.”

Friday was Omri’s birthday. His second in captivity. As he turns 48, somewhere in Gaza’s tunnels, he will write again, with talk about two daughters who were still babies when he last saw them.

The posted hostages say Omri was seen alive last July. The belief of deprivation of her husband’s survival seems unshakable, but this is the most difficult time of the year. Not only Omri’s birthday, but also the eve of Pesach (Passover), when the Jews celebrate the biblical history of a way out in which Moses brings his ancestors from slavery in Egypt.

“You know, Pesach is the Freedom Festival,” Lisha says when we meet in a park near Tel Aviv’s hostage square.

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

Omri’s birthday was celebrated on Friday.

The posters calling for his release once listed the hostage’s age as 46. Then 47.

Danny, Omri’s father, crossed both and wrote 48.

Nearby preparations were underway for a symbolic Sader of Easter or a ritual holiday.

A long table was installed, with the seats for each of the other 59 hostages still in gas (of which 24 are thought to be alive).

The square is full of symbols: a model of the Gaza Tunnel, tents for presenting the music festival in Nova, where hundreds were killed.

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

Liche and her daughters have not yet returned to the house where family life has been inflated in several traumatic hours, 18 months ago.

But Liche says he occurs from time to time he returns to Nasal Oz to communicate with her husband.

The kibbutz is only 700 meters from the border with gas. This is as close as it can reach Omri.

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

After entering into force in mid -January, the border was quiet. Lisha allowed himself to hope, although he knew that Omri’s age meant that he would not be among the first to be released.

But the cessation of the fire ended in just two months. Now the border area – which the Israelis call the “Gaza Pocket” – echoes once more to the sounds of war, reigning the deepest fears of all the hostage families.

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

Liche is careful not to condemn his government, as some families have hostage. But she says that when she realized that the war had resumed, she was “really angry”.

When Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Hungary Victor Orban last week, he published that the two men had discussed the “Hungarian hostage”, a reference to the double Israeli-Hungarian citizenship of Omri.

They were stinging for deprivation.

“I was really hard to see that,” she says. “Omry has a name. He is not just a hostage.”

In a message about Easter, handed over on Friday, Netanyahu promised the families again that the hostages would return and Israel’s enemies would be defeated.

In recent days, they have been noticed another transaction to end the fire, but this does not feel inevitable.

“The last time it happened,” Lisha says, referring to the first deal to end the fire in November 2023, “we waited more than a year for another agreement. So now we will wait a year more? They can’t survive there.”

For now, it seems that her WhatsApp messages to OMRI are destined to remain unopened.

But it doesn’t stop her from looking for gray ticks to make it blue.

“I know it will happen someday.”