He Spent 491 Days as a Hamas Hostage. This Is How He Survived.

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Two years ago today, five terrorists broke into Eli Sharabi’s safe room on Kibbutz Be’eri. He had been sheltered there for hours with his wife, Lianne, and teenage daughters, Noiya and Yahel, reading horrific texts flooding in from neighbors and hoping somehow his family would be spared.

They were not. The terrorists shot and killed their dog, then dragged Eli away, leaving his family behind. As they pulled him out the door, he looked back and shouted: “I’ll come back!”

After 491 days in Hamas captivity, Eli did come back. He survived—with most of his time buried deep underground, shackled, starved, subjected to constant humiliation, and psychological and physical torture—all because he believed he would one day be reunited with his wife and daughters. That belief kept him alive.

But when he was released on February 8 under a ceasefire agreement, he soon learned the devastating truth: Lianne, Noiya, and Yahel were dead. Hamas murdered them on October 7, 2023. His brother Yossi, also kidnapped, had been killed in captivity as well.

Eli’s memoir, Hostage, out today, is the first published account by a released Israeli hostage. He writes in unflinching detail about being held in the tunnels, about his Hamas captors, and about his singular focus on survival.

I read the book, through tears, last week on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. Yom Kippur is a day of atonement and forgiveness, but it’s really a day of reckoning with life and death. The story Jews around the world read that morning is of Moses’s final speech to the Israelites before his death, delivered as they stand on the edge of the Promised Land—after slavery in Egypt, after 40 years of wandering in the desert and the loss of an entire generation. Moses tells them: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, so that you and your descendants may live.”

If anyone has earned a right to despair, to give up on life, it’s Eli Sharabi.

But he doesn’t. What’s remarkable about Eli is that he chose—and continues to choose—survival at every turn. He chooses life in the face of death. Again and again and again.