Title: Hostage
By: Eli Sharabi
Harper Collins Publishers, 2025
Eli Sharabi tells his story of being kidnapped from his family home in Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7, 2023, and details the approximately 16 months he spent as a hostage of the Hamas terrorists in his stunningly well-written book Hostage. Originally published in Hebrew and now skillfully translated into English, this book is worth the while of everyone who cares about those qualities that make us human and, in the case of Hamas, inhuman.
When Eli Sharabi was kidnapped, his wife and teenage daughters were still alive. Throughout his captivity, Sharabi motivated himself to survive and to bear all the hardships he had to endure at the hands of Hamas – the humiliations, the beatings, the starvation, and the cruelty – with the thought that he would eventually be reunited with his family. When he was released in February 2025, in return for the release of dozens of Palestinian terrorists from Israeli jails, the first thing he asked for was to see his wife and daughters.
Sharabi was 51 years old when he was taken hostage. He had been married for over 20 years, and he and his British-born wife had raised their daughters, ages 16 and 13, on Kibbutz Be’eri. As a young man, Sharabi had served in the IDF. Descended from Moroccan and Yemeni Jews, he spoke English and Arabic as well as Hebrew. A university graduate, he had worked in various businesses and was the business manager of the kibbutz, which, besides agriculture, had a substantial printing business.
Sharabi’s Hamas captors first took him to the streets of Gaza, to display their prize. There, a mob tried to tear him apart because he was Israeli. Regarding that brief scene, as well as many others in the book, Sharabi describes what happened in a way that implies much more than he states. The Hamas captors protected him from being murdered by the mob, since Sharabi was more valuable to them alive than dead. The implication is that the people of Gaza are a hate-soaked lot, ready to kill a captive Jew if they only have the chance. That scene also implied that the entire Gaza population is allied with the Hamas project and, as Sharabi later realized, if he tried to escape, the entire population would be against him, and he would find no help.
He was first held for some weeks in the home of an educated and relatively prosperous Gazan family. For the first three days, he was blindfolded and bound so tightly he could not move at all. In fact, the captors had to feed him. In that first location, there was also a Thai agricultural worker who had been taken hostage. That poor man could not speak English, Arabic, or Hebrew, was in terrible distress and cried the whole time. The Hamas captors beat the Thai captive when he could not answer their questions. In that home, during the first few days of captivity, Sharabi heard not only Israeli airstrikes on Gaza but also the sound of Hamas rockets being launched at Israel.
After three days, the Hamas guards, armed with Kalashnikov rifles, untied the captives, took off their blindfolds, and put metal shackles on their legs. The guards lectured Sharabi: He should go back to Morocco or Yemen where his grandparents came from – this land belongs to Muslims and there is no room for Jews. Sharabi was forced to make a “proof of life” video, reading lines that his captors had written for him so that Hamas could use it for propaganda, bargaining, and influencing Israeli public opinion.
Sharabi watched the people around him carefully. He tried to engage them, not by way of sympathizing with them but to make the best of the awful situation. “I don’t identify with them. I don’t pity them. I’m not confused about who they are or what they really want. And… if I thought that snatching their guns and killing them would get me home, I’d do it in a heartbeat.” He talks to his guards, who are young, naïve, and uneducated. They have been taught by Hamas spokesman Abu Obaida that all Israelis only want to kill Arabs. When Sharabi challenges his guards about why Hamas kidnapped women and children, the guards reply that women and children were kidnapped “by mistake” – as if such a thing could actually happen.
After 48 days in that house, above ground, Sharabi’s captors take him into the tunnels where he spent more than a year as a hostage. “It will be safer there,” his captors tell him as they move him. In the tunnels, he is imprisoned with other Israeli hostages, almost all of them taken from the Nova Music Festival and much younger than he was. Although one of Sharabi’s many good qualities as an author, and I am convinced also in real life, is that he does not emphasize his own importance, he was clearly something of a father figure to the much younger men with whom he was held in the tunnels. They were in small groups of three or four, which, of course, would make rescue more difficult. Some of the hostages were moved around by their captors.
Sharabi does not criticize any other hostages for any of their behavior. He portrays the other captives at their best, even when they were starved, even when they were beaten, even when they were offered extra food to recite passages from the Koran, even when they were invited to “pray” with their captors, even when they quarreled about how to divide the meager rations they were given.
Because he was held with other Israelis in the tunnels, Sharabi is also able to tell us parts of their stories. Israelis will recognize the names of many of the other people he describes and mentions, because those names are familiar to us from hostage lists and posters, from the pleas of their families for their return, and from other descriptions by survivors of October 7. These were clearly peaceful, secular, perhaps somewhat hedonistic young men. One among them had been raised in a religious household and knew most of the daily prayers by memory. He would recite Shacharit and other important prayers, and the other three or four Israeli hostages with him would gather around him and say “Amen.” This small group of hostages developed an evening ritual of telling each other something “good” that happened that day. It might be that they were not beaten that day. It might be that a particularly brutal guard was not there that day. It might be as simple as the fact that nothing got worse that day.
The younger hostages tell Sharabi about the butchery at the Nova Music Festival which was as bad as the homicidal rampage at his kibbutz. He learns, for instance, about the young people hiding in bomb and missile shelters when Hamas arrived and threw grenades and sprayed rifle fire into the shelters. Among the other hostages he met was Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who lost part of his arm in a blast from a Hamas grenade in a shelter, and whom Hamas later executed, along with five other hostages, as IDF troops approached their location.
The hostages were starved not only for food but also for information. They could only gather a little from what the Hamas operatives said, and much of that was lies. Hamas told them the lie that half of all Israelis had fled the country (that would be the Islamists’ fondest dream) and that Hezbollah and Iran were invading Israel from the north. Hamas also told them the lie that no one in Israel cared about them anymore and that the government had abandoned them. The hostages knew that their captors thought things were going well when Hamas operatives were in an upbeat mood and routinely shouting “Allahu Akbar!” Yet despite that, the captives could sometimes hear the reverberations of bombs falling and hear their captors, who slept in the next room, crying at night. The Hamas operatives never seemed to lack for food, some of which came in UNRWA packages, while the hostages were often limited to one or two dried or moldy pitas per day. Hamas badly beat Sharabi, breaking his ribs and hurting him in other ways. Of course, there was no significant medical attention in the tunnels, just a Hamas operative who had more training than the rest of the captors.
Later, Hamas made another proof of life/propaganda/psychological warfare movie. Sharabi had lost so much weight that he was barely recognizable. And in the end, after more than a year in the tunnels, the release of Sharabi and three others was stage-managed. The hostages were forced to rehearse and participate in the degrading ritual of a release ceremony in which they were given their lines by Hamas. Sharabi understood that the Gazans who watched this ceremony were Hamas sympathizers and Jew-haters. He writes: “The people who are responsible for us being here – scrawny, famished hostages, separated from their families for hundreds of days, in pain and agony – are also responsible for our welfare and go through the motions of pretending they care about us. They are two-faced and both faces are savage.” Yet Sharabi understood that if Hamas did not accompany the hostages into the streets of Gaza, “every single person in that crowd would lynch us right there and then.”
The Red Cross drove the hostages back to Israel. The Red Cross never came to see them while they were in Hamas’s hands. Sharabi stepped out of the vehicle in Israel. He asked to see his wife and daughters. The IDF officer who was assigned to him said, as gently as she could, that his sister and his mother would tell him. He understood right there. His wife and children were murdered on October 7. He learned that his brother, his brother’s wife, and their children who lived nearby on Kibbutz Be’eri had also been murdered. Sometime after he had been in the Israeli hospital and saw the doctors and the psychologists, he visited the graves of his wife and children. He sat and cried for 40 minutes. He had been to rock bottom.
The book was well-written in Hebrew because of Sharabi’s intelligence, powers of observation, and utter lack of self-pity. The translation into English is also notable for its clear, declarative sentences, often in the present tense, a style that adds immediacy to the story. The book’s refusal to use clichés or common tropes, its sharp descriptions, and the overall high quality of the writing make it worth the reader’s while as a literary work. To a large extent, Sharabi’s Hostage is about what it means to be an Israeli in this troubled age: subject to murder, violence, and abuse for living in the ancient homeland of the Jewish people; subject to the senseless, unjustified, and theological hatred of many of the world’s Muslims, a people who outnumber the Jews by a ratio of more than 130 to one. In another way, it is the story of this solid, sensible man and how he and the other Israelis he met along the way made the best of an awful situation.
May Hashem bless and protect him and all the other hostages, their families, and all that is theirs.