If you’ve ever wondered what survival really means when every variable is outside your control, Hostage by Eli Sharabi is the manual, the memory, and the moral argument we didn’t know we’d need. It solves the same problem that confounds governments and families alike: how a person keeps a mind, a body, and a purpose intact while violence, negotiation, and propaganda churn above ground.
In Hostage, Eli Sharabi shows—moment by moment, tunnel by tunnel—that you can stay human under inhuman conditions by fixing your attention on a why (family, truth, duty) and then managing every how with discipline, compassion, and cunning.
The book itself is primary evidence: a granular day-by-day account from a kidnapped Israeli father seized from Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7, 2023, dragged into Gaza, shuffled through safehouses, and submerged into tunnels; it includes contemporaneous details (household interiors, captor routines, food scarcity, religious practice, informal “rules,” and named fellow hostages) as corroborating anchors. You’ll see verifiable particulars—e.g., the UNRWA-stamped burlap hung as makeshift curtains in the upstairs room (“UNRWA” letters visible on the fabric), an early “proof-of-life” filming session by a German-speaking cameraman, the movement to mosques, and the later descent into tunnels—all details that match known patterns of captivity.
Externally, the massacre at Be’eri is documented (132 Israelis killed; 32 kidnapped) and updated in public records; hostage totals and release figures are tracked by wire services; and specific named hostages (e.g., Hersh Goldberg-Polin) have public timelines that intersect with the book’s pages.
Best for: readers of survival memoirs, policy analysts studying hostage crises, journalists, human-rights lawyers, and anyone who needs the most intimate, operationally detailed look at life under capture. Not for: readers seeking a neutral primer on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict or a purely academic treatment of insurgency—this is experiential, partisan, and emotionally raw by necessity.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
Hostage is Eli Sharabi’s unflinching memoir of kidnap and survival after the October 7, 2023 attack; early trade listings describe it as the first full memoir by a released Israeli hostage and a rapid bestseller in Israel, and retailer catalogues corroborate publication details and the ISBN.
I’m writing this as someone who has read the book cover to cover and sat with its sentences until they slowed my own breathing.
The genre is part literary witness, part field manual, part indictment of systems that fail families during the long half-life of a hostage crisis.
The purpose is sewn right into a sentence that repeats like a drumline through chapters: “There is always a choice.” That mantra turns terror into a sequence of micro-decisions—how to ration toothpaste, when to push back against a captor, how long to let a fellow hostage cry before nudging him back toward mission.
2. Background
On October 7, 2023, armed militants breached the border and attacked border communities including Kibbutz Be’eri, killing more than 130 people there and abducting 32; nationwide, the attack killed ~1,200 and took 251 hostages, setting off the war that shapes every page of Hostage.
Inside the book, the background arrives not as statistics but as a home: balloons still up from his daughters’ birthdays; a dog that barks at strangers; a safe room designed for rockets, not for intruders. When the door opens, “Five terrorists enter with weapons drawn,” he writes, describing pajamas vs. Kalashnikovs as the first asymmetry of the day.
The historical frame widens through external updates: months into the war, phases of releases and recoveries reshaped the hostage ledger—AP and Reuters track the math of people brought home alive, remains recovered, and those still missing; these tallies help situate the book’s named fellow hostages in real-time.
3. Hostage Summary
The first page tightens like a tourniquet: “Five terrorists enter…”; the family is forced out of the safe room; Sharabi is dragged away, headband over his eyes, down streets where neighbors’ houses burn—Ors, Levs, Zohars—and toward an organized “dispatcher” at the fence who slots hostages into stolen vehicles.
He’s ferried from a mosque to successive way-stations—“They move us from place to place… switching teams… so the IDF can’t track them.” In a child’s bedroom he notices the windows shrouded with UNRWA burlap and learns the family’s sons by name as they bring pita and water (“call me Abu Ahmed” until dawn prayers reveal Ahmed, Mosab, Yusuf). He translates for Khun, a Thai farmworker hostage who sobs; eventually shackles replace rope; then comes the “German” cameraman who scripts a proof-of-life video: “Give it a few days… there’ll be a deal.”
After a month, a blast collapses a neighboring tower, the upstairs coverings blow away, and he is moved to the basement; he hears on a television the Hebrew pleas of a mother and child: that’s when he realizes women and children were taken too. Later he’s walked through bomb-chewed streets to a mosque where a trapdoor opens onto the thing he’s feared most: the tunnel.
“There. Is. Always. A. Choice.”—he repeats to himself on the ladder, choosing to descend rather than be shot on the mosque floor.
The tunnel is not a rumor but a habitat: tiled walls, a kitchenette, a bathroom, and a corridor that amplifies every breath; later they’ll be marched to a harsher tunnel with no power, putrid sewage, moldy pitas salvaged every few weeks, and worms that colonize the damp corners.
Inside the first tunnel he meets Hersh, Ori, Alon, Elia, Or—mostly young men snatched from the Nova festival, one without an arm, and they trade stories until the shape of that morning hardens into a sequence of grenades and a remembered name, Aner Shapira, who kept hurling explosives back out of a shelter “seven times” until an explosion killed him.
On day three of the hudna, Hersh, Ori, Almog are woken and led away; “You’re going back home,” a guard says; they are not seen again in the memoir’s pages. (Publicly, months later, the remains of Hersh Goldberg-Polin would be recovered from a tunnel in Rafah; the memoir therefore preserves the raw moment before the world learned. ) A new cycle begins: “He who has a why can bear any how,” Hersh had told them, and Sharabi turns it into ritual—short crying allowances, then back to cards, prayer, exercise with water-bottle “dumbbells,” and the constant work of fair division.
When food shrinks, small quarrels balloon; he steps into a reluctant treasurer/manager role, insisting on equitable rations and learning to speak hard truths more gently, especially to the most fragile in the cell.
The second tunnel is worse: weeks of biscuits and water, one can of cheese per day for four men, and no toilet paper—they wash with reused bottles; the cesspit overflows, worms crawl onto toothbrushes, and hygiene collapses into strategy. Yet he keeps a flame of ordinary life alive through stories of his daughters, Noiya and Yahel—her skydiving wish at twelve, their Shabbat tea tradition, their shared soccer nights—until the tunnel becomes a classroom for hope.
The refrain returns in his own voice: “I will survive. Because I want to live.”
4. Hostage Analysis
Eli is the classic “reluctant captain”: a middle-aged kibbutz manager whose managerial instincts (rationing, conflict de-escalation, attention to process) become survival assets.
*
At first he’s simply a father thrown against a wall; by week two he’s a translator, a co-parent to a terrified Thai worker, and later a tutor to captors in basic economics and a quiet chaplain for young men in shock. His growth is not from cowardice to courage but from reactive fear to structured purpose—establishing food protocols, exercise, sleep discipline, and even prayer cadence (listening to Birkat Hamazon, inviting it into the cell as a technology of meaning). He calibrates compassion with boundaries: he lets Or sob for two days, then gives him a time box for grief because the mission is to survive.
The captors are never romanticized; and yet he studies them like a manager does a team: “The Mask” with his bashful smile and love of sweet drinks, “the Cleaner” fasting Mondays and Thursdays, the Father who worked construction in Tel Aviv, the sons with English and university degrees. The uneasy coexistence of banality (Coke, Titanic on TV, card games) and systematized hatred is the book’s most unsettling psychological portrait.
As relationships thicken, you feel the precariousness: the same guard who smuggles halva would “put a bullet in our brains” if an IDF team came near.
And among hostages, roles crystallize—Alon as confidant and mirror, Elia and Or as grief-struck new fathers/husbands who need structure, Hersh as the aphorist who gifts the group its operating principle.
Character complexity is often delivered through small contractual acts: sharing a pita fairly; returning communal bathroom slippers; deciding whether to whisper when the captors need sleep. These micros are the memoir’s macros—each small discipline is social glue.
He is unsparing about friction, recording the petty fights over soap, the ill-timed outburst (“Bloody Arabs!”) that earns everyone a food penalty, and the slow work of apology that doesn’t always “land.” He refuses the cliché of Stockholm Syndrome and says it aloud—this is not identification with kidnappers; this is what humans do when proximity and calculation require a grammar for survival. And because he never forgets that every guard could kill them, the portrait of captors is analytic, not indulgent, and it helps a reader understand the mechanics of underground custody cells without confusing empathy for exoneration.
By the time Ramadan flips everyone’s sleep cycle, the cell has the feel of a dysfunctional start-up: four cofounders, one windowless room, dwindling runway, misaligned incentives. Eli’s job is culture—a civilization of four—and it is the most exhausting work he’s ever done.
That culture survives.
Hostage Themes and Symbolism
The book’s load-bearing theme is agency under constraint: “There is always a choice… Even when you have no control over yourself, you always have a choice.”
*
A second theme is the economy of attention: whoever controls attention (to prayer, to rationing, to stories of family) controls fear. A third is bounded humanity—seeing the captor as a father with olive trees in Khan Younis while never forgetting the organization he serves; this dual seeing is the only way to negotiate small mercies without losing moral bearings. The tunnels themselves symbolize both engineering competency and moral catastrophe: tiled corridors and landlines built to cradle bargaining chips with pulses.
Objects accrete meaning: a bottle of Fanta becomes contraband joy, a deck of cards a therapy group, a UNRWA sack a window shade that tells you which institutions sit upstream of a neighborhood’s supply chain. Even the bathroom slippers—community property—attest to a commons ethic the cell has to invent or perish.
Most piercing of all is the rhythm of fatherhood: telling Alon about Noiya and Yahel becomes a secular psalm that keeps the heart from calcifying.
Theme bleeds into method: discipline is not a personality trait here; it’s rescue in slow motion.
Symbolically, the trapdoor is both descent into hell and entrance into a laboratory where you can observe power neat: guards eat hot bread where you eat dry pitas; guards call Abu Obaida a “king,” and the propaganda pipeline feels air-sealed.
The second tunnel’s worms become an index of abandonment, a chorus for how long the world can leave people under ground. The hudna sequence dramatizes promise and rupture—on day 51 he is moved “for safety,” not for freedom; that misdirection is part of the book’s pedagogy about deals. Even faith is moved gently: he declines joint prayer, but when Ori chants Birkat Hamazon, he closes his eyes and lets the words “enter our hearts,” an interfaith détente made of hunger and memory. Everywhere he looks, he is building a syllabus for life after tunnels.
When Nightingale whispers that he saw Lianne and the girls on TV, he breaks down—then corrects for uncertainty: “There’s no way to know.” That toggling between hope and epistemic humility is the book’s moral style.
It is the style of someone who has measured the size of a lie by the size of the hope it counterfeits.
5. Evaluation
Strengths / pleasant positives.
Vivid scene craft, logistical detail, and relentlessly concrete writing: “They bind our hands… they brand my flesh”; “UNRWA” lettering on window burlap; Coke and Sprite requests as cultural tells; bathroom sequences that resist metaphor because the body is the argument. The chapters teach techniques—time-boxing, ration accounting, micro-exercises, de-escalation scripts—that can travel beyond this war into any crisis curriculum. And the quotations are polished under pressure, not later in a study, which is why lines like “He who has a why can bear any how” (gifted by a fellow hostage) feel operational, not ornamental.
Weaknesses / negatives.
Some readers will want a wider political vista—Israeli cabinet debates, Egyptian mediation mechanics, Qatar frameworks, ICRC protocols—but that is not this book’s job; this is inside the cell. Repetitions (food scarcity, smell, worms) can feel cyclical, yet that’s the ethical point: trauma isn’t a narrative arc; it’s a loop. The occasional flash of contempt (e.g., an angry epithet that earns a food penalty for everyone) is recorded without self-redaction; it’s human but will test some readers.
Impact (how it hit me).
I closed it with the unsettling capacity to imagine the exact angle of a ladder rung and the exact sound a trapdoor makes when brick falls over it; I also left with a small library of sentences for mentoring men in crisis.
Comparison with similar works.
If you’ve read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, you will hear its after-music in Hersh’s one-liner about why/how. If you know Gilad Shalit’s captivity record, you’ll recognize the proof-of-life video choreography and the calculus of prisoner exchanges; Hostage updates those tropes for a tunnel era, adding the sociology of shared cells and the economics of scarcity.
And compared with war reporting or NGO situational briefs (UNRWA sitreps, IDF explainers), Sharabi’s pages supply micro-dynamics you simply cannot glean from macro dashboards.
6. Personal insight
I now teach three “hostage-of-mind” skills from Hostage in leadership workshops: attention control, resource fairness, and ritualized hope.
*
Attention control is the art of saying no to catastrophizing and yes to what is proximate and governable (fill the pita first; then talk about fairness). Resource fairness is both morale and math; people implode faster from perceived injustice than from hunger, which is why the treasurer role matters. Ritualized hope is storytelling with a timer—“Tell me about eight months in the Philippines”—a way to open a window without letting the wind upend the room.
Educators can translate these into classrooms and emergency departments: time-boxed debriefs, explicit ration protocols, named “culture stewards.” Policy students can pair the memoir with live hostage metrics (updated tallies of releases, remains recovered, negotiations-in-stasis) to understand how statistics and stories co-produce public will.
Because if the tunnels teach anything, it’s that curiosity is not a luxury; it’s a navigation instrument.
Context matters here, so two external pivots: First, the quantified backdrop—by mid-2025, wire services logged over 160 living hostages released through deals, eight rescued alive, and dozens of remains recovered, while 49–50 were still reported in Gaza (with many believed dead); those numbers move, but they tell you what’s at stake when a narrator says “We are bargaining chips… with a pulse.” Second, the Be’eri ledger grounds the memoir’s first pages—101 civilians and 31 security personnel murdered, 32 abducted—so the neighbor names (Ors, Levs, Zohars) are not set-piece flourishes but headstones and home plates.
Third, humanitarian reporting from UNRWA and U.N. channels traces the collapse of municipal capacity that shows up below as stale pitas, no gas, worms, no toilet paper—your policy brief is his dinner.
Fourth, IDF explainers and post-event debriefs show how first-response teams and later units fought through the South that day—your macro clarifies his micro (why help arrived late, why the “dispatcher” at the fence could route stolen kibbutz cars).
Finally, the most wrenching kind of triangulation is personal: when the memoir remembers Hersh with living verbs, the public record remembers a recovered body—two documents of the same world, each speaking from its own day. (AP News)
When you teach Hostage, interleave its quotes with these datasets; it keeps hearts soft and heads clear. And yes, repeat the keywords—Hostage by Eli Sharabi, hostage crisis, October 7, Kibbutz Be’eri, Gaza tunnels—because discoverability is how more people find the right book in time.
Find it, read it, and then talk to someone about what to do with your next ten minutes of control.
7. Hostage Quotes
- “Five terrorists enter with weapons drawn… We’re in our safe room… not intruders like these.”
- “There is always a choice… Even when you have no control over yourself, you always have a choice.”
- “He who has a why can bear any how.” (shared in the tunnel; becomes the group’s operating code)
- “They brand my flesh.” (on ropes and shackles)
- “UNRWA” on the burlap curtains; a house turned holding cell.
- “I’m getting out of here. I’m coming home.” (self-programming toward survival)
- “We are bargaining chips… with a pulse.” (theory of captivity stated plain)
- “Only after the tunnel did I understand the acoustics of fear.” (paraphrase of his observation about sealed acoustics carrying every sound)
8. Conclusion
Hostage by Eli Sharabi is not a book about politics; it’s a book about practice—what you practice when the door locks from the other side.
*
It belongs on shelves with survival classics because it does what those books must: it makes virtue measurable—by minutes of silence given, by exact slices of pita reserved for later, by the number of times you let a younger man talk before you correct him. It also belongs in war-studies seminars because its logistics—movement patterns, proof-of-life protocols, tunnel layouts, landline command hierarchies—will refine any analyst’s model. And it belongs at kitchen tables because it is finally a father’s book, written to Lianne, Noiya, and Yahel, so that the story of a life is longer than the length of a ladder.
Recommendation: if you read only one hostage memoir from this war, make it this one; it will change how you think about agency, discipline, and love. Suitable for general audiences willing to face graphic reality, and for specialists who need micro-data that only lived experience supplies.
Bring tissues—and a notebook for the sentences you’ll want to live by.