The story I lived to tell

FOR ISRAEL'S HOSTAGES, AS FOR THE WORLD, OCT. 7 WAS ONLY THE BEGINNING

- - ELI SHARABI

Eli Sharabi's Hostage, the first memoir of captivity in Gaza in the aftermath of Oct. 7, appeared in Israel in May, just four months after his release; the English translation was published in the U.S. on the second anniversary of the Hamas attack. A taut, immersive chronicle of endurance, the book also serves as a window into the Israeli view of the war.

The author was pulled away from his wife and two daughters in the first hours of the attack. For the next 491 days, with rare exceptions, the only people Sharabi saw were other hostages and Hamas militants—the same parties that have remained front and center in the viewfinder of Jewish Israelis for two solid years, even as most of the world shifted its focus to the Palestinian civilians also confined in Gaza, and dying in the tens of thousands under Israeli fire.

During captivity Sharabi ached for his life in Be'eri—which as a kibbutz, or commune, is the original expression of the interdependence on which Israel functions. Another is the army, which he looked for frantically, and in vain, as he was thrown into a car along with a Thai farmworker.

In the first of the excerpts below, they have just arrived in the Strip. In the next, 51 days have passed. He has been hidden in a family's home, sometimes bound with rope in excruciating pain. Sharabi, who is terrified of being held in a tunnel, is being moved to one. He travels with a fellow Israeli hostage, one of several who will be his intermittent companions. In January, he's been moved again, this time to a space where he will remain for eight months. Deliberately underfed, he loses a great deal of weight, but finds a different sustenance in traditions that bind even secular Israeli Jews.

Sharabi also passes hours working to shore up the spirits of fellow prisoners, and to glean something of what's happening outside from the mood of his jailers ...

OCTOBER 2023