On Sunday morning, Celine Ben David Nagar should have been getting ready for her first day back at work after six blissful months of maternity leave.

But she is believed to be somewhere in Gaza, in the hands of Hamas, and her family is living a nightmare that has now lasted a week.

Celine, 32, had set off early on Saturday morning with two friends to attend the Nova music festival in southern Israel.

But, they turned back when they heard the rockets.

The three of them hid in a shelter near Sderot. From there, at 07:11, Celine sent her last message to Ido, her husband and father of their daughter, Ellie.

“Soldiers are coming,” Celine wrote. “God, it was a mistake to come here.”

Ido ran to the site on Saturday, but the army did not let him pass. Sunday morning he found Celine’s car riddled with bullet holes but otherwise as she had left it.

Later that day, Ido found a survivor who told him that Hamas fighters had thrown grenades into the shelter, killing Celine’s friends. But Celine had survived, the stranger said.

After so many days Ido has not heard anything about Celine, however all he knows is that her body has not been found.

“You’re not sleeping and you’re not eating and you’re in a kind of crazy uncertainty,” he said in a telephone interview with the BBC from his home near Tel Aviv. “You are completely helpless.”

Ido broke down in tears as he tried to describe his wife, who grew up in France and is a French-Israeli national.

“She is an amazing woman, a person surrounded by friends and love,” he said. “And she’s an amazing mother. We have a six month old baby. This was supposed to be the last party she would enjoy before going back to work. We agreed to pick her up at midnight, but she never came home.”

Little is known about the location or condition of the approximately 150 hostages believed to have been taken in Gaza. Hamas said it had hidden the hostages in “safe places and tunnels” but threatened to kill them if civilian homes were bombed by Israel without warning.

For Ido and the hundreds of other relatives, it’s a nightmare they can’t wake up from. “I’m trying to fight it in every way I can think of, I’m trying to be optimistic and I’m trying to think positive thoughts,” she said through tears.

“I want to believe that she is alive there, in Gaza, and maybe she is taking care of the children who were kidnapped with her. I just hope she knows we’re fighting for her and that she’s telling herself she’s coming home,” Ido said.