Hostage by Eli Sharabi: First memoir by one of Hamas' Israeli hostages reveals how in a tunnel 100ft deep, bubbling with sewage and crawling with maggots, Eli Sharabi was beaten and humiliated ...but knew he had to SURVIVE

Eli Sharabi assumed the emergency alarm was just another rocket attack – the kind of everyday intrusion that his family had come to consider an unwelcome fact of life as they sheltered at home in Kibbutz Be’eri, early on October 7, 2023, awaiting the all-clear as Israel’s Iron Dome defence system intercepted any missiles.

But as Sharabi snuck out to his kitchen to brew a pot of tea, it quickly became clear that the threat – far from everyday – was unlike anything ever witnessed in the community where he had lived since his teens.

As nightmarish reports grew of murderous terrorists running amok, WhatsApp buzzed with a message from a classmate of Sharabi’s youngest daughter, living a few hundred yards away: her mother had just been shot.

It was 10.45am when Sharabi and his family – still in pyjamas – were dragged out of their safe room (designed to protect them from rockets, not intruders) by balaclava-clad killers wielding Kalashnikovs. Balloons still decorated the house to mark his two daughters’ birthday celebrations (16 and 13) the previous week.

Such is the unimaginable horror which opens this harrowing memoir.

Reportedly the fastest-selling book in Israeli history, it describes in gruelling detail the 16 months that he endured in captivity as one of 251 hostages abducted by Hamas that morning.

We see Sharabi taken away from his family to be driven blindfold to a house barely three miles away in Gaza, his legs bound so tightly that the flesh burns.

Days pass without sleep amid the continual whine of drones and shattering bomb blasts as Israel begins its retaliation for the Hamas atrocities.

Another captive, a Thai worker, can’t stop crying. The elderly householder charged with looking after them puts slices of pitta bread in their mouths, pulling down their boxers when they need to pee, their hands and legs still tied.

Soon Sharabi is driven away once more – this time to a mosque, and through a trapdoor, ominously plunging 100ft down into the suffocating pitch-black of a tunnel. In a long, narrow chamber clanging with noise, stiflingly hot, he meets six other hostages, including survivors of the carnage at the Nova music festival, whose terrifying accounts of bloodshed haunt his sleep.

Yet as he’s the eldest captive, Sharabi – aged 51 at the time – urges the others to stay strong and resist self-pity.

‘I’m focused on surviving... I’ve been practising the art of self-sacrifice and living with people who need me for years,’ he says; his experience as a father, added to his decades as a business executive, equip him ‘to navigate complex human dynamics and conflicts’.

Still, as weeks and months pass, bickering inevitably erupts, as the hostages argue over who snores or talks too much, or who is eating more than their fair share of the rations provided.

Games of backgammon and cards bring a measure of respite – as does Leigh Bardugo’s bestselling fantasy novel Shadow And Bone, re-read over and over again by Sharabi’s fellow prisoners (it’s not his thing).

The uneasy routine is disrupted in January 2024 when the mosque is bombed, and everyone is evacuated to another tunnel.

Surfacing, Sharabi walks through ‘an apocalyptic landscape’ like ‘an actor in a Hollywood movie with an outlandish storyline’.

The new tunnel is even more claustrophobic. Sharabi, weakening with dizziness, watches his fellow captives struggle with diarrhoea, vomiting and infection, as their clogged cesspit bubbles with sewage, maggots running rampant.

As the men lose weight, their iron shackles loosen. Guards offer extra food to anyone who will recite verses from the Koran; all refuse.

One of the guards audibly watches footage from October 7 over and over on his iPad. Another beats Sharabi so badly he can barely move for a month. But another guard surprisingly takes time to handwash Sharabi’s shirt when he complains of being smelly – an unexpected kindness that nonetheless does nothing to convince the author that each man wouldn’t ultimately be hellbent on the other’s elimination.

Sharabi, who speaks Arabic, gets an insight into his kidnappers from overhearing their conversation. Not only do they not believe in the state of Israel, he says, they don’t believe in ‘France or Britain or Sweden either’ – a line liable to chill Sharabi’s international audience.

He thinks his captors were brainwashed, but rejects any notion that they served Hamas to earn a livelihood. The men invading his home weren’t making ends meet, he says; they are ‘medieval barbarians, whose hatred for Jews and Israel trumped their love of life itself’.

Sharabi’s story makes tough reading: how could it not?

Yet there are rare moments of gentleness and fellowship, even comedy.

He briefly manages to secure more rations for his fellow hostages by feigning illness, tricking a guard out of a bottle of Fanta. Banned from exercising, he and his fellow hostages continue in secret, using water bottles for dumbbells.

All the while, Sharabi holds firm to his belief that his family are alive.

Horribly, we know from the start of the book that this is not so.

Hostage is dedicated to the memory of Sharabi’s wife, Lianne, and their daughters Noiya and Yahel – all murdered on October 7, as was his brother, Yossi, another dedicatee.

Yet Sharabi makes us live through his emotions when he didn’t yet know their fate. We experience his captivity as he lived it, with him yearning for the moment when his family will finally be reunited.

He learns that they are dead only when – after 491 days – he is at last released. The longed-for taste of freedom is cruelly bittersweet.

As a conclusion to the book, it is hard to bear.

Given that Sharabi now campaigns for the release of the remaining hostages – 20 are thought to be alive – he must know too that is the only sense by which the book’s story can be said to have ended.