For 745 days, Nvidia senior executive Gideon Rosenberg waited hopefully for the moment he would meet abducted employee Avinatan Or, held captive in Gaza’s tunnels since the Hamas-led invasion of October 7, 2023.

Two months ago, it finally happened. Rosenberg, deputy general counsel and head of HR for the American chip giant’s Israel operations, recounted how excited he was to welcome Or — a person he felt he had come to know very well, though they had never met in person.

“When I met Avinatan at the hospital a few days after his release, it was absolutely surreal,” Rosenberg told The Times of Israel during a recent interview at Nvidia’s Tel Aviv office. “Until that point, he was a two-dimensional person on a poster and on the t-shirt I had been wearing for two years — and then suddenly, he’s three-dimensional, a real person. That was just very, very strange, but of course we were all very happy.”

Rosenberg, 49, is the personnel director for Nvidia’s 5,000 employees in Israel, who work out of five offices and R&D hubs in the cities of Yokne’am, Ra’anana, Tel Aviv, and Beersheba. Or, 32, grew up in the West Bank town of Shilo, the second of seven brothers, and joined Nvidia as an electrical engineer after graduating from Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba.

“I know more about Avinatan than I know about any other employee — although we had never met — as I got to know and spent many hours with all of his close and extended family as well as friends,” said Rosenberg. “I’m pretty sure I know more about him than he would want a manager to know, from stories about his childhood and other tales.”

Or, who was released on October 13 as part of a ceasefire deal with the Hamas terror group in Gaza, was mostly held alone in underground tunnels after he was abducted from the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023. His girlfriend, Noa Argamani, was also kidnapped from the festival and was rescued by Israeli forces in June 2024.

The ceasefire deal marked a key step toward ending a tumultuous two-year war triggered by the October 7 atrocities, during which thousands of marauding terrorists from Gaza slaughtered some 1,200 people and abducted 251 to the Strip. The hostages, living and dead, have been released in tranches over the last two years, in exchange for Palestinian security prisoners, and Or was among the........

© The Times of Israel