On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists stormed Kibbutz Be’eri, shattering the peaceful life Eli Sharabi had built with his British wife, Lianne, and their teenage daughters, Noiya and Yahel.
Dragged barefoot out his front door while his family watched in horror, Sharabi was plunged deep into the suffocating darkness of Gaza’s tunnels. As war raged above him, he endured a grueling 491 days in captivity.
Lianne and the girls, aged 13 and 16, were killed in the attacks. His brother, Yossi, was also kidnapped and died in captivity. It is hoped his body will be returned to his family today.
Sharabi’s new book, Hostage, is the first memoir to be published by a released Israeli hostage, and in it he describes the unimaginable conditions he and the other newly released hostages were forced to endure – including starvation, psychological abuse, and physical beatings.
In this exclusive excerpt, he and three fellow hostages have just been transferred to a new tunnel under Gaza, as his soldier captors attempt to evade the IDF‘s raids.
Difficult days lie ahead.
This tunnel lacks basic supplies and equipment. It doesn’t even have a landline for our captors, and they spend several days trying to set one up.
Our only food is what they brought with them from the previous tunnel. In the kitchenette across from our cell, there’s no gas. No way to cook the dry food.
For the first three days in this tunnel, we eat nothing but biscuits. Two or three in the morning. Two or three at night.
Sharabi had built a peaceful life in the kibbutz with his wife and two daughters
Sharabi on the day of his release, February 8, 2025, flanked by two Hamas fighters
Released Israeli hostage Nimrod Cohen arrives in Tel Aviv on October 13, 2025
Biscuits and water. That’s it.
After three days, they bring us some raw fava beans.
I start feeling weak. My body needs real food. I think it takes them nearly two weeks to get pitas into the tunnel.
They’re stale, probably foraged from the street. I don’t care. I savor the single pita bread I’m given and devour it slowly.
Besides the pitas, they give us a can of cream cheese. I break my pita into pieces, dip each one into the cheese, and chew slowly. I save the last morsel for the end of the day, just to fall asleep with something in my stomach.
After two weeks of surviving on biscuits, one daily can of cheese between four men, and a handful of stale pitas, a gas burner finally arrives.
We hope things will start to improve. They clearly have supply issues.
Unlike in the previous tunnel, there are no regular deliveries. All they have is what they manage to scavenge outside. And outside, there’s hardly anything. Hunger sets in. Not from deliberate starvation, but from scarcity. For them too.
Sharabi with his British wife, Lianne (right), and their teenage daughters, Yahel and Noiya, who were all killed in the 10/7 attacks
Kibbutz Be’eri is riddled with bullet holes and blood stains following the 10/7 attacks
More than 100 Israelis were slaughtered at Kibbutz Be’eri – including Sharabi’s wife and teenage daughters
Sharabi was held in a series of tunnels below Gaza – like hostage Evyatar David (pictured)
Sure, they eat more than us, and better. But even they don’t have much.
The shortages make them more irritable. Less patient with us.
We’re careful not to cross them, not to speak out of line, not to make any requests.
We’re impatient too. The hunger turns each man inward. Empathy dries up. These are hard moments. When everything you are, everything I am, is reduced to one thing: hunger. Nothing else matters.
We have no mattresses. At night, we spread our blankets on the ground and sleep on them, in pain.
Our toothpaste runs out after three weeks. We brush our teeth with plain brushes.
After a few months, we get a new tube, but it only lasts a month, even after we agree to ration it and use toothpaste once every other day.
There’s no toilet paper. We clean up in the bathroom with a water bottle.
There are jerricans in the tunnel: some for drinking, hauled down by our captors, and others, not safe to drink, for washing and toilet use.
We reuse the same water to wash our hands, clean ourselves off after using the toilet, and refill the water tank, since there is no running water.
Sharabi (right) with his brothers Yossi (left), who was killed in captivity, and Sharon (middle) who survived
Freed hostage Eitan Mor is reunited with his family in Israel following his release on October 13
Our rations keep shrinking, and with them, the frequency of our bathroom visits. We do not share toilets with our captors. We have ours; they have theirs. They clean theirs, not ours.
Soap is a rare commodity. When they have some, they give us a little. At first more often. Then much less. Eventually, not at all.
Our hygiene deteriorates. Our bodies are filthy. We go for weeks without showering. Our clothes are never washed. Our space is never cleaned. And there’s no way to clean it. Everything becomes gross.
We shower once every six or eight weeks. With a bucket. And a bit of soap. Every time we shower, we’re shocked by how dirty our bodies are. The layers of grime.
I scrub and I scrub with the little soap I have. I never knew the human body could collect so much filth.
We constantly pray we won’t get sick. We realize how easily it could happen. Diseases we’d never worry about at home, infections that shouldn’t occur, could absolutely happen here.
I’m spared most of them, thankfully. But not the others. The other three men held captive with me suffer from constant diarrhea. Frequent vomiting. Fungal infections. Nails falling off. My problem is mostly dizziness. I think it’s because I’m so weak.
Another week passes. And then another. The days crawl by and pile atop of each other.
The cesspit under the toilet stops draining. Everything spills over. The raw sewage rises to the surface, adding to the unbearable stink, which spreads and worsens with every passing day.
Sharabi was released after 491 days in captivity, enduring appalling conditions
I don’t know how to describe it. How do you convey what it feels like to be swallowed in such a suffocating odor? It’s a stench you never get used to.
At some point, worm colonies start to form around us. I can’t see them: I’m shortsighted and left my glasses behind on the path in Be’eri. But the others can.
They describe tiny white worms multiplying in the toilet tank, in the stagnant sewage drains, by the sink, on the floor, on our toothbrushes.
We tell our captors about the worms. It scares them.
Over time, we understand: they care about our health. Not because they care about us. Because they care about themselves. If one of us gets seriously ill, things become complicated.
They can’t provide proper medical care down here. And moving even one of us to a medical facility aboveground would be a major operation.
Their job is to keep us alive, for as long as possible. That’s clear to us. And to them. That’s why they’re here: to shoot us if IDF soldiers arrive to rescue us, and to keep us alive unless and until that happens.
We are bargaining chips. They need bargaining chips. And they need bargaining chips with a pulse.
Our captors bring us some sort of tool to try to unclog the cesspit, hoping to make things better. It’s no help. We simply get used to living with the worms.
We rinse our toothbrushes before each use. We tread carefully on the floor. We rush in and out of the bathroom to avoid lingering too long.
Every morning, we check our bodies to make sure we’re not covered in worms. It doesn’t always work. Eventually, we surrender to them. We accept they’re here to stay.
Excerpt from the book HOSTAGE by Eli Sharabi. Copyright ©2025 by Eli Sharabi. Used with permission of Harper Influence, an imprint of HarperCollins. All rights reserved. Hostage is published by Swift Press in the UK.
