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For 421 days, Ronen and Orna Neutra fought to bring their 21-year-old son Omer home from Hamas captivity, believing he was still alive. Three years after the Oct. 7 massacre, they are marking the anniversary by mourning the loss of their son.
“It doesn’t get easier,” Orna Neutra told “Fox & Friends” Wednesday. “For us, this is three years since Omer was killed, but it’s really the first year where we can properly go to his gravesite and mourn him and have a memorial.”
Omer Neutra, a Long Island native and grandson of Holocaust survivors, moved to Israel after high school and enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Hamas terrorists attacked his tank near the Gaza border on Oct. 7, 2023, killing him and taking his remains into Gaza.
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Orna and Ronen Neutra, parents of Omer Neutra, speak during the Republican National Convention (RNC) at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on July 17, 2024. At the time, Omer was believed to be alive and held hostage by Hamas following the terrorist group’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. (Hannah Beier/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
For 421 days, Neutra’s parents didn’t know he had died and continued their fight to bring him home alive.
The couple pleaded for Omer’s release for over a year, believing he was among the Hamas hostages who could still be brought home.
“For 14 months, we were fighting to bring him back alive,” Orna recounted. “We thought he was a live hostage.”
The Neutras wouldn’t learn their son had been killed on Oct. 7 until 421 days after the attack. Even then, their wait to bring him home was far from over.
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The bodies of American citizens Itay Chen, left, and Omer Neutra, right, were returned in Nov. 2025. (The Hostages and Missing Families Forum)
“After that, it took over a year,” Orna said. “We actually just buried him on November 7th, 2025, and that’s less than a year, so it’s been such a crazy ordeal… it’s very difficult.”
Israel is marking three years since the deadliest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. As the anniversary arrives, Omer’s parents say remembering their son also means remembering what he believed he was defending.
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“It’s all about moral clarity,” Ronen Neutra said. “Our son is a grandson of Holocaust survivors. He understood that Israel is the only state where Jewish people are fully protected and protecting themselves.”