Life
Hostage by Eli Sharabi review: ‘a highly readable account of barely imaginable nightmare’
The first hostage releases a book and instead of the misery memoir you might expect, it is a story of survival
October 6, 2025 10:29
The first hostage releases a book and instead of the misery memoir you might expect, it is a story of survival
October 6, 2025 10:29On October 7, as terrorists snatched him from his house at Kibbutz Beeri, Eli Sharabi screamed “I’ll come back” to his British wife Lianne and teenage daughters Noiya and Yahel. He’ll never know whether they heard him.
When he was finally released from captivity after 491 days, nearly five stone lighter, Hamas terrorists encouraged him to say he was looking forward to seeing his wife and daughters. It was the last torture they were able to inflict on him: the watching world knew that all three had been killed on October 7, set alight in their home. The day before, Hamas had told Sharabi that his brother Yossi had been killed in captivity.
Hostage, which became the fastest selling book in Israel’s history, could be a misery memoir, but, instead, it is a story of survival. Within days of being released, Sharabi flew to meet President Trump, and since then, he has been an unstoppable force. He is the first of the hostages to release a book and those lucky enough to have heard him talk in person will know that he refuses to indulge in self-pity. He has chosen to live and to ensure the remaining hostages will do too.
Early on in the book, he describes how terrorists are punching him as he’s dragged into Gaza, but even then, all he can think about is surviving to return home. “There is no more regular Eli,” he writes. “From now on, I am Eli the survivor.” In the first few weeks of captivity, he formed a strange bond with his captor and his family: they would play card games, and Eli taught them basic economics. There is a strangely touching moment in which he is briefly invited to stand by a window with his captor and smell the sea air, feeling the breeze on his face. “We stand like friends,” he writes. “Like brothers. Like something that can’t be defined… As if he’s not a religious extremist. As if he doesn’t hate my people.”
But at the same time, he writes that if he could escape by shooting this man, he would. And he knows that this man would have no compunction about shooting him if he were told to.
Sharabi begins his captivity alongside a Thai worker called Khun who barely speaks any Hebrew or English and spends most of his first few days crying. Sharabi, whose family hailed from Morocco and Yemen, speaks fluent Arabic. He becomes a father figure trying to protect the confused young man and continues to maintain that role for the younger hostages he meets during his long stretch of captivity.
One of these, although they were only together for a few days, was Hersh Goldberg Polin. Polin recounted his mantra, taken from the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: “He who has a why can bear any how,” Sharabi writes. “The saying feels like a gift. It matches the spirit I am already in.”
At the time, there were seven of them held together in an underground tunnel. Then Polin, Ori Danino, and Almog Sarusi are taken. Sharabi thinks to freedom, but in reality, they were taken to another tunnel and starved before being shot.
Sharabi spent most of his captivity deep underground with three others. Alon Ohel, who is still being held, Or Levy and Eliya Cohen, who have both been released. He describes how the men would sometimes argue: every crumb of pitta counted as they were systematically starved.
But even in these dark times, where a captor could beat him up so badly his ribs were broken, Sharabi’s determination to survive shines through. He initiated an evening ritual where the hostages had to talk about the “good” things that had happened to them that day: they’d gone all day without being hit/ been allowed an extra half a piece of pitta/ the worst terrorist hadn’t been been around for a few days.
Hostage is a highly readable account of a near impossible to imagine nightmare. For all the pain it recounts, it’s ultimately about finding the light in the darkest of circumstances.
Hostage by Eli Sharabi (trans by Eylon Levy)
Swift Press
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