As he is being dragged out of his house by Hamas terrorists with Kalashnikovs on the morning of Saturday 7 October 2023, 51-year-old Eli Sharabi tells his wife, “Lianne, don’t freak out”. She will be safe, he is sure. So will their daughters, Noiya, and Yahel, who turned 16 and 13 the week before. Terrorists would not kidnap women and children. And besides, they have British passports. It is this thought that enables Sharabi to stay calm as he is forced, still wearing his pyjamas, into a vehicle stolen from Kibbutz Be’eri where he has lived for 35 years, and driven into the Gaza Strip.
“I’m being kidnapped,” he tells himself. “I understand this is a catastrophe. I understand what this means. I don’t mind that they’re beating me. I don’t even feel it. Because in these moments, as I’m being led past the kibbutz fence, under the blazing sun, engulfed by the smell of smouldering ruins, a headband strapped over my eyes, dragged by terrorists gripping both my hands, totally aware that I am being abducted into Gaza but knowing at least that Lianne and the girls were left behind, I focus and concentrate on one mission: surviving to return home.”
Sharabi was one of 251 people abducted by Hamas that day. He spent 491 days as a captive of Hamas, most of that time buried alive in the network of cramped, fetid tunnels underneath Gaza. He was released on 8 February 2025, broken and emaciated, weighing just 44kg. Less than four months later, Hostage was published in Israel, a firsthand account of his ordeal.
“It was important to me that the story come out as quickly as possible, so that the world will understand what life is like inside captivity,” Sharabi told the Times of Israel when the book was first published in Hebrew. “Once they do, they won’t be able to remain indifferent.”
What is it, exactly, that Sharabi wants the world to understand? To call his book harrowing is an understatement; any illusions readers might have about the treatment of hostages by Hamas, thanks to the stage-managed handovers where soon-to-be released abductees are forced to recite scripts written for them by their captors, should be quickly dispelled. At first, he is held in a family house in Gaza along with a terrified Thai captive who speaks no Hebrew, English or Arabic. Their hands and feet are bound; later, they are shackled instead. Then 50 days in, the real hell begins as Sharabi is taken down a ladder under a mosque, to “a bottomless underworld with no light, no air, and no return”, along with six other Israeli men and their Hamas captors. After a few days, three of them are told they are being released as part of a temporary ceasefire and exchange deal. It is months before Sharabi learns that the men he bid farewell to and promised to see again in Israel were in fact murdered underground.
Over the next year, Sharabi sees daylight only three times, when moved between tunnels. The hostages are fed little, then less, then barely enough to survive – perhaps one piece of pitta a day. They are taunted, told they’ve been forgotten by their government, by their families. They are chained throughout, humiliated, barely allowed to wash, forced to beg to use the toilet, often beaten. At one point, Sharabi’s ribs are broken. They receive no medical treatment for their injuries and worsening malnutrition, beyond the occasional paracetamol or eye drops. Not once do the Red Cross or other international aid workers come to visit them.
Nor do they receive any news about the outside world – the war, the hostage negotiations, what has happened to their families. Hostage is dedicated to the memory of Yossi, Sharabi’s brother who was taken by Hamas kidnappers from the same kibbutz and who died in a collapsed building after 100 days, possibly as a result of an IDF airstrike, and of Lianne, Noiya, and Yahel, whom he was sure would be safe. Their photos are on the first page; right from the start, we know their fate. The heartbreaking irony is that until the very end, Sharabi himself does not. From his initial capture throughout his 16 months in captivity, it is the thought of returning to his wife and teenage daughters that stands between him and insanity. “He who has a why can bear any how,” he repeats to himself, again and again. We hope with him, feeling his faith sputter as he learns that women and children were taken hostage too, that a pregnant woman gave birth in captivity, that there is no guarantee Lianne, Noiya and Yahel are alive. Still, he will not give in to despair.
In “rehearsals” in the days leading up to his release, Hamas officials coach Sharabi to say in interviews how much he is looking forward to seeing his wife and children. He learns they are dead, killed in the Kibbutz Be’eri massacre after he was dragged away, only once he is on Israeli soil and asks a social worker where they are. “It’s all clear in that moment, right there, standing in front of her. I understand everything. I understand it in my bones. I understand it from head to toe. I understand it, and I feel the pain pulsating through my broken body, a pain without a name.”
Amid the unrelenting bleakness, there are flickers of the enduring spark of human spirit. Sharabi and his fellow hostages come to know one another like family. As the oldest in the group, he becomes a surrogate father to the others, including Alon Ohel – a pianist, who was 22 when he was abducted from the Nova festival and dreams of studying music. They recount their lives, their ambitions, the people waiting for them on the outside. They pray, they mark Shabbat underground, a group of secular Jews taking comfort in the hymns and rituals that have strengthened their ancestors through the ages. They commit to working together, to sharing the scant food they are given, to refusing to give up their humanity or their hope.
They give nicknames to the Hamas guards with whom they share their subterranean existence. The Triangle. Nightingale. The Mask. The guards have wives and families too – they grieve for their loved ones as the war takes its unimaginable toll, as the Gaza death count rises. For the most part, the brutality is such that chances for empathy are limited. But sometimes Sharabi wonders what has driven the men keeping him chained in this hellish dungeon to this barbarity, if perhaps he could even have been friends with one of them in another life. “Under his terrorist exterior, there is still a calm and mild-mannered human being. In our interactions, I begin to understand the depth of his ignorance and how badly he has been brainwashed. They’re absolutely certain that Israelis only want to kill them and dream of doing evil.”
And every day, the Israeli hostages find things to be thankful for. A drink of tea, a piece of fruit, a particularly cruel guard being absent that day. “Hope is never something that comes easily,” Sharabi writes. “It’s always something you’ve got to fight for, to work on.”
The Hebrew version of Hostage was the fastest-selling book in Israeli history. Yet for some reason, when the book came to be published in English in the UK, mainstream publishers passed up the opportunity. By this time, the events of October 7 that had sparked such horror – the massacre of civilians at the Nova music festival, the families kidnapped or gunned down in their homes in Kibbutzim across southern Israel – had faded in the public consciousness. The focus had moved on: to Israel’s offensive in Gaza, to the famine, to the 60,000 dead Palestinians and the increasingly fraught warnings of genocide. The hostages, photos of whom had been plastered on posters begging “Bring Them Home” across the world, seemed to have become an afterthought beyond the regular protests in Hostage Square in Tel Aviv – no longer a priority for either the global community, aghast at the situation in Gaza, or for the Israeli government, whose military aims had expanded far beyond retrieving its citizens. Sharabi’s fears about the world’s indifference appeared to have come true.
It was the independent publisher Swift that chose to take on the book. Neil Blair of the Blair partnership, Sharabi’s literary agent, said he hopes the commercial and critical success of Hostage “gives mainstream UK publishers pause for thought”. It was published in the UK on 9 October 2025.
Then on 13 October – eight months after Sharabi was freed – a ceasefire deal orchestrated by Donald Trump saw the release of the 20 remaining living hostages.
I read Sharabi’s book that day in a single agonising sitting, footage of the celebrations in Israel and Gaza playing in the background. I listened on the radio to Gill and Pete Brisley from Bristol – the parents of Lianne, Sharabi’s wife, whose British passport was not enough to save her or her daughters from being murdered by terrorists. I saw the photo of Alon Ohel, the young musician held in the tunnel with Sharabi, who was among the 20 finally released from his nightmare after more than two years in captivity. I read that he played the piano in his hospital room in Tel Aviv.
Since his release, Sharabi has been a relentless campaigner – for the return of Alon and the rest of the hostages, and for the bodies of those like his brother Yossi who were killed. Within two months of emerging blinking from the tunnels, he had met Donald Trump in the White House and Keir Starmer in Downing Street, and addressed the United Nations Security Council. His resilience is almost as hard to comprehend as the ordeal he suffered; his mantra that “he who has a why can bear any how” continuing to drive him on even once the why has been tragically snatched from him. This book is vital for anyone wishing to understand the horror of the past two years from a perspective that has too often been overlooked. But there is a more general message here too, about survival, perseverance and the power of human endurance in the face of unimaginable trauma. Now that the final hostages have been released – now that Alon can play the piano once more – I hope that Eli Sharabi can find some semblance of peace.
Hostage: The Unflinching First Memoir by an Israeli Hostage
Eli Sharabi
Swift Press, 208pp, £18.99
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[Further reading: Trump’s hostage deal was the easy part]
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This article appears in the 23 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Doom Loop