All those people who cling to conspiracy theories about October 7, 2023—from the ignorant to the evil, from gullible college students to veteran faculty, from “truthers” to celebrities—should read Sharabi’s Hostage. I consider it the most important book of 2025.
As the first account published by one of the 251 Israeli residents abducted by Hamas on October 7, Hostage sets a high bar for other memoirs and biographies. Published initially in Hebrew in May 2025, while Hamas still held hostages in Gaza, it set sales records and became the fastest-selling book in Israeli history. The English-language edition came out on October 7, 2025.
Sharabi documents the events of his 491 days in captivity with clarity and detail. He also describes his struggle for survival with insight and literary skill. This mass hostage situation invites comparison with that of the U.S. hostages seized in Khomeini’s Iran on November 4, 1979. Indeed, Sharabi’s keen observational detail in Hostage makes it worthy of comparison with a Yellow Ribbon: The Secret Journal of Bruce Laingen (1992); In the Shadow of the Ayatollah, A CIA Hostage in Iran (2001) by William J. Daugherty; The Destined Hour, The Hostage Crisis and One Family’s Ordeal (1982) by Barbara and Barry Rosen; and the raw and angry emotion of Iranian Hostage (1982) by Rocky Sickmann.
Sharabi presents his account in the present tense, thereby giving it a sense of immediacy. The first sentence recounts his abduction: “Five terrorists enter with weapons drawn.” Separated from his wife Lian and daughters Noya and Yahel, he describes how “the terrorists start dragging me out of the house. I’m barefoot. I can’t see the girls anymore, because they’re in the kitchen behind me and the terrorists are holding my head forward.” From that point on, Sharabi is on a mission to survive. Only the promise of returning to his family sustains him throughout his ordeal. “There is no more regular Eli,” he writes. “From now on . . . [I am] Eli the survivor.”
The pre-abduction “regular Eli” was a resident of the Kibbutz Be’eri and one of its managers, having held various financial positions there. He was also once a university teacher. After his captivity, and after learning that Hamas had murdered his family, Sharabi became an advocate for the release of the remaining hostages and began a public-speaking career.
Shortly after being taken to Gaza as a hostage, Sharabi was brought first to a mosque and then to a house, where he spent 52 days as the prisoner of a family trusted by Hamas. During those 52 days, Sharabi says, “[I am] growing closer to my captors and the family holding me in their house. We begin to form bonds of trust and even start to feel close. These sorts of connections are almost inevitable.” However, “This isn’t Stockholm Syndrome. I don’t identify with them. I don’t pity them. I’m not confused about who they are or what they really want.”
Eventually, he is moved into Hamas’s underground world, where he is constantly transferred from one tunnel to another. There, he suffers starvation, humiliation, and beatings of varying degrees of severity at the hands of multiple Hamas terrorists, to whom he and his fellow hostages give nicknames: Orange, after his hair color; Eyebrow, after his unibrow; and Smiley, after his perpetual grin. One terrorist, nicknamed Garbage is, as Sharabi recounts, “especially violent and cruel and takes pleasure in humiliating us.” “Peaky,” a top Hamas commander, is described as “a disciplined Hamas officer.”
When Sharabi meets Peaky again after months of not seeing him, he writes, “we’re both happy, genuinely happy, to be reunited.” But as always, reality sets in: “I try to ignore the double game between us and what’s happening under the surface—me, a man brutally torn from his life, and him, complicit in the crime of my kidnapping. My feelings may be real but they don’t for a second obscure the true nature of our roles here, if it came down to it, each of us would be capable of eliminating the other. Without a moment’s pause, without regret.”
Meanwhile, the cruel Hamas guard nicknamed Circle “delights in joining our ritual humiliation and mistreatment” and “enjoys watching October 7 footage on a loop on his iPad.” Like the other Hamas guards who watch videos of kibbutz residents and concertgoers being murdered and raped, “the clips invigorate [Circle] and fill him with verve and malice.”
Whenever Sharabi finds himself meditating on his bizarre situation, he often perceives similarities between himself and the terrorists who hold him captive. He describes two in particular, nicknamed Mask and Cleaner, as “mild-mannered,” yet “brainwashed,” and as standing out from the “medieval barbarians, whose hatred for Jews and Israel trumped their love of life itself.” When he comes close to sympathizing with these two captors, whom he believes “chose to be terrorists for economic reasons,” his wit and pragmatism snap him out of it: “I mean, who hasn’t tried to top up his income and found himself holding starving hostages in a dungeon somewhere?”
Of the last time that he sees Smiley and Peaky, Sharabi writes: “I never see them again. They were with me for over a year, and there’s no goodbye. Neither from me, nor from them. Whatever I know about them, whatever conversations we had, however well we may have known each other—they are still Hamas terrorists. Their job was to keep me and the others locked inside this horrific ordeal. To keep depriving us of our liberty. Of our lives. And I don’t give a shit about them.”
Unaware that Sharabi speaks Arabic, his captors let him pick up details about them. He observes the cruelest and meanest captors, who “subject us to nonstop psychological terror . . . speak affectionately with their own children.”
At age 51 when he was captured, Sharabi was the oldest hostage among those held with him, making him something of a father figure to the younger ones—notably to Ori Danino, Almog Sarusi, and Hersh Goldberg-Polin, all of them later murdered in captivity. The younger hostages often looked up to him and depended on his emotional strength during their ordeal.
In addition to its human drama, Hostage shatters important myths about October 7, among them the trope that many Gazans neither consented to the kidnappings nor supported Hamas. If videos of Palestinians cheering and hitting hostages as they were dragged through the streets of Gaza were not enough, Sharabi’s accounts of the hostile “civilians” he encountered should settle the matter. In fact, when he is pulled from a car, his Hamas abductors ironically become his protectors against “a sea of people who start thumping my head, screaming, trying to rip me limb from limb.”
Not every hostage has the ability or skill to write a book like Sharabi’s about their time in captivity. What is now needed is a book similar to 444 Days, The Hostages Remember (1985) by Tim Wells. Wells spent two and a half years “talking with the former hostages [held by Iran] . . . to provide an opportunity for [them] to describe their experiences and to have those experiences transcribed into a narrative framework.” Hostage demonstrates Sharabi’s ability to write such a book. I hope he does so.
A. J. Caschetta
