In Eli Sharabi’s first hours of freedom earlier this year, a social worker led him to a room stocked with shampoo, toothpaste, and soap. In Gaza’s tunnels, he had gone months without bathing; now he could scrub off the grime of captivity. He had sustained himself through his 491 days as a hostage by picturing the moment when he would rush into the arms of his wife and daughters. But the tunnels had sealed him off from the world. Standing in daylight, he learned that Hamas had murdered his loved ones in their home’s safe room on October 7. The social worker hovered as he showered and changed, to protect Sharabi from himself.
Today, the last of the living Israeli hostages were liberated after more than two years—and their release has liberated the Israeli psyche from its fretful obsession with their fate. Having invested themselves so deeply in the hostages’ story, Israelis greeted the moment as an ecstatic conclusion that helps justify the terrible toll of their nation’s longest war.
The hostages’ release is, indeed, an epochal moment, one that may not end the war in Gaza but will certainly redirect its course. I, however, find myself thinking more about the intimate details of what the hostages have experienced. I filter the possibilities not just through Sharabi’s recollections, which ultimately tell a story of extreme perseverance, but also through what I know about my own grandfather, who escaped death during the Holocaust by hiding in barns and forests. Although he tasted the sweet fruits of survival—marriage, children, a new life on a new continent—his mind always doubled back to what he lost. The Nazis murdered his first wife and daughter. Survival was torment, and he ultimately lost the will to live. He killed himself in the grocery store that he owned in Washington, D.C.
How does a human being survive two years of torment? And how do they make sense of their life once they resume? Within months of his release, Eli Sharabi summoned the courage to ask these questions of himself in a short book, Hostage. The manager of a kibbutz roughly two miles from Gaza, Sharabi was dragged from his home, away from his English-born wife and his daughters, ages 16 and 13. “A sea of people who start thumping my head, screaming, trying to rip me limb from limb,” he remembers.
Arriving in Gaza, his captors first confined him to a home belonging to a family, where children did homework and women cooked as Hamas operatives watched over him and a Thai worker, also kidnapped on October 7. During this initial chapter, they were fed well and sometimes even able to feel the Mediterranean breeze through an open window.
What he feared most was the prospect of being hauled underground—a fate described by Gilad Shalit, a hostage seized by Hamas in a cross-border raid in 2006 and depicted by Israeli television with enough detail to implant nightmares. In the network of passageways, rigged with booby traps, there was no hope of rescue or escape. “Please, God, not a tunnel,” Sharabi kept praying.
On the 52nd day of his captivity, his captors led him into a mosque, opened a trap door, and ordered him to begin climbing down a ladder. For the first and only time in Gaza, Sharabi contemplated suicide. “There’s always a choice,” he told himself. “There. Is. Always. A. Choice.”
The tunnels felt boiling hot, and Sharabi stripped to his underwear to cool himself before his guards wrapped shackles around his ankles. Eventually, they led him to a makeshift prison cell, which he shared with three other hostages. At first, his captors fed him twice a day. But as the war progressed, that dwindled, sometimes to a moldy pita or biscuits, while he could smell the meals that they cooked for themselves. Malnutrition weakened him. He had spells of dizziness and his belly caved inward.
When he needed to use a toilet, he would ask for permission. But Hamas minders would make him wait for as long as an hour. The toilet itself brimmed with sewage, a stench that permeated his room and never dissipated. Eventually, the bathroom and then his room itself were crawling with worms, which inhabited his toothbrush. For one stretch of captivity, he went eight months without seeing the light of the sun.
To taunt the hostages, captors would loudly play video clips of October 7 on their iPads, and the noises would echo down the corridors into their room. The captors would tell them, You’ve been abandoned by your government. He couldn’t have known it, but that accusation carried a whiff of plausibility. Members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet sometimes described hostages’ families, advocating fervently for a deal to release them, with disdain. At a Knesset committee meeting, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told the families, “We hear you too much,” before ordering guards to clear them from the room. For the settler-led faction within the government, the release of the hostages wasn’t the ultimate war aim. They were a distraction from the goal of resettling Gaza, of reclaiming biblical Israel.
But those fantasies have been foiled, at least for the time being. The hostage deal that the Israeli right worked to undermine has happened. And after the liberated cleanse themselves, as Sharabi did, they will sit for their first television interviews and recount the rituals that allowed them to persist.
Sharabi has described being thrown into a makeshift cell, with other hostages, including a young man named Hersh Goldberg-Polin. The unavoidable fact about him was that he had lost his arm on October 7, and his fellow hostages couldn’t stop staring at the remaining nub. Conversation soon turned to the very subject of life itself. Hersh quoted something he’d learned from the writings of the Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl: “He who has a why”—a purpose for living—“can bear any how.”
Unlike Sharabi, some of the hostages already surmised that they had lost their families in the massacre, shattering the most compelling why of them all. Yet that didn’t diminish their will to live. Despite being secular, they found solace in listening to an observant hostage, the son of a rabbinical scholar, recite the Jewish grace after meals. Like Odysseus, they trained their minds to relentlessly focus on home. “There is no more regular Eli,” Sharabi told himself in his first days in Gaza. “From now on, I am Eli the survivor.”
That he clung to optimism in the face of despair wasn’t inevitable. As my grandfather’s biography suggests, there are other outcomes. So it’s worth celebrating these examples of existential heroism when they are in full view.
This weekend, on the cusp of the release of the last 20 living hostages in Gaza, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, stood in the plaza in front of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, dubbed Hostages Square, to address a jubilant throng. He called the hostages’ release the end of a nightmare. In reality, the nightmare never ends; trauma that endures for generations is the surest outcome of this war. But we also know that the hostages are going home, living proof that hope can persist even in the darkest hole.
The post The Existential Heroism of the Israeli Hostages appeared first on The Atlantic.
