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

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Oct 7, 2025

Eli Sharabi, a former Israeli hostage held by Hamas for 491 days, shares his harrowing journey of survival with unflinching honesty. He recounts the chilling moments of his capture, the anguish of losing his family, and the psychological tactics that kept him alive during captivity. Eli emphasizes the power of faith, ritual, and camaraderie among fellow hostages. Despite the unimaginable loss and survivor's guilt, he advocates for remaining hostages and aims to honor his family's memory by fostering hope and human connection.

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ADVICE

Use Routine To Protect Sanity

Maintain routines and focus on actionable tasks to preserve mental stability in prolonged crisis.
Treat release as uncertain and structure daily life around achievable, repeatable practices.

ADVICE

Name Small Positives Daily

Practice gratitude even in dire circumstances by naming small daily positives to rewire focus away from despair.
Train this 'muscle' deliberately so the group sustains morale and resilience.

ANECDOTE

Shabbat Rituals Became Lifelines

Eli found power and identity in Jewish rituals underground, reciting Kiddush and visualizing Shabbat to connect to loved ones.
These rituals summoned memories that reinforced why he needed to survive.

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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.

We 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.

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