Hostage by Eli Sharabi: First memoir by one of Hamas’ Israeli hostages reveals how in a tunnel 100ft deep, bubbling with sewage and crawling with maggots, Eli Sharabi was beaten and humiliated …but knew he had to SURVIVE

Eli Sharabi assumed that the emergency alarm was just another rocket attack; It was the kind of daily attack that he had come to see as an unwelcome fact of life as his family took refuge in their home on Kibbutz Be’eri early on October 7, 2023, waiting for the all-clear while Israel’s Iron Dome defense system intercepted any missiles.

But when Sharabi sneaked into the kitchen to brew a pot of tea, it quickly became clear that this threat—far from everyday—was unlike anything witnessed in the society he had lived in since his youth.

As nightmarish reports of murderous terrorists wreaking havoc mounted, WhatsApp was buzzing with a message from the classmate of Sharabi’s youngest daughter, who lived a few hundred meters away: Her mother had just been shot.

It was 10.45am when Sharabi and his family (still in their pajamas) were dragged from their safe room (designed to protect them from rockets, not intruders) by ski-masked killers wielding Kalashnikovs. Balloons were still decorating the house last week to celebrate the birthday celebrations of her two daughters (16 and 13).

That’s the unimaginable horror at the beginning of this harrowing memoir.

Said to be the fastest-selling book in Israeli history, it describes in grueling detail the 16 months he spent in captivity as one of 251 hostages kidnapped by Hamas that morning.

We see Sharabi taken from her family and taken blindfolded to a house just three miles from Gaza, her legs tied so tightly that her flesh burns.

Sleepless days pass amidst the constant hum of drones and devastating bomb explosions as Israel begins to retaliate for Hamas’ atrocities.

Another prisoner, a Thai worker, can’t stop crying. The elderly landlord responsible for looking after them puts pita slices in their mouths, pulls down their boxers when they need to pee, and their hands and legs are still tied.

Soon after, Sharabi is suspended once again; This time, he passes through a mosque and a hatch, and falls ominously 30 meters down into a suffocating pitch black tunnel. In a long, narrow room, ringing with noise and stiflingly hot, he meets six hostages, including the survivors of the massacre at the Nova music festival, whose horrific tales of bloodshed disturb his sleep.

Family: Eli Sharabi with his wife and daughters before he was killed (left) and with his mother and sister after his release by Hamas (right)

But since Sharabi, then 51, was the oldest of the captives, he urges others to stay strong and resist self-pity.

‘I’m focused on survival… I’ve been practicing the art of sacrifice for years and living with people who need me,’ he says; His experiences as a father, combined with his decades of experience as a business executive, equip him to ‘deal with complex human dynamics and conflicts.’

Yet as the weeks and months pass, squabbles inevitably break out as hostages argue over who snores too much or talks too much or who eats more than their share of the provided rations.

Backgammon and card games provide some respite; like Leigh Bardugo’s bestselling fantasy novel Shadow and Bone, which is read over and over again by Sharabi’s fellow inmates (it’s not his doing).

This uneasy routine is disrupted when the mosque is bombed in January 2024 and everyone is evacuated to another tunnel.

When Sharabi surfaces, he walks through an ‘apocalyptic landscape’ like ‘an actor in a Hollywood movie with a strange story’.

The new tunnel is even more claustrophobic. Sharabi, weakened by dizziness, watches his fellow captives struggle with diarrhea, vomiting and infection as clogged septic tanks bubble with sewage and maggots run rampant.

As men lose weight, the iron shackles loosen. Guards offer extra food to anyone who recites verses from the Quran; They all refuse.

Armed: Palestinian fighters near the border in the central Gaza Strip

One of the guards repeatedly watches the footage from October 7 with audio on his iPad. Another beats Sharabi so badly that he can barely move for a month. But when another guard complains that Sharabi smells, he surprisingly takes the time to hand wash his shirt; It’s an unexpected kindness, yet it does nothing to convince the author that neither man will ultimately be determined to see the other eliminated.

Sharabi, who speaks Arabic, gets an idea about her kidnappers by overhearing their conversation. Not only do they not believe in the state of Israel, he says, but also ‘they don’t believe in France, England or Sweden’; It’s a sentence that could startle Sharabi’s international audience.

He thinks his captors were brainwashed, but rejects any notion that they serve Hamas for a living. He says the men who occupied his house cannot make ends meet; they are ‘medieval barbarians whose hatred of Jews and Israel outweighs their love of life’.

Sharabi’s story makes for difficult reading: how could it not?

Yet there are occasional moments of kindness and friendship, or even comedy.

By briefly feigning illness, he manages to secure more supplies for his fellow hostages by tricking a guard out of a bottle of Fanta. Banned from exercising, he and his fellow hostages secretly continue to use water bottles as dumbbells.

Sharabi always maintains her belief that her family is alive.

Unfortunately, we know from the beginning of the book that this is not the case.

The Hostage is dedicated to the memory of Sharabi’s wife, Lianne, and their daughters, Noiya and Yahel; as did his brother Yossi, another devotee, all of whom were killed on October 7.

However, Sharabi makes us experience emotions whose outcome he does not yet know. We experience his captivity as he does, longing for the moment when his family will finally be reunited.

He only learns of their death when he is released 491 days later. The longed-for taste of freedom is brutally bittersweet.

This is difficult to bear as the conclusion of the book.

Given that Sharabi is now campaigning for the release of the remaining hostages – 20 of them are thought to be alive – he must also have known that this was the only sense in which the book’s story could be said to have ended.