Omer Shem Tov, a former hostage of Hamas terrorists in Gaza, on Wednesday posted online a video of him speaking on the phone with Norwegian football star Erling Haaland.
Haaland asked Shem Tov, 22, how he was doing. Shem Tov, who was abducted from the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im on Oct. 7, 2023, and released 505 days later, said: “I really appreciate what you’re doing and I really like you, you’re amazing, I’m so excited to be speaking to you.”
The soccer player, a striker for Premier League club Manchester City and the Norway national team, is Shem Tov’s favorite striker, Channel 12 News reported. Haaland, one of the world’s best-known soccer players, has not spoken publicly about Israel or the war that broke out on Oct. 7, 2023.
In November 2023, he posted to his 40 million followers on Instagram: “No innocent child deserves to die” as a caption to a photo of himself with two children.
His conversation with Shem Tov, which grabbed headlines in Israel and circulated widely on social media, was not widely covered by the media in Norway, where anti-Israel attitudes are common. Fifty-one percent of respondents in a recent poll in Norway said that what Israel is doing to Palestinians is comparable to what Nazis did to the Jews.
One conservative news site, Document.no, did write an article about Haaland’s conversation with Shem Tov, praising the gesture and Haaland as “good representatives of this important part of Norwegian culture.”
