When Eli Sharabi came back home to Israel on February 8, looking emaciated and skeletal, we all already knew his story, even if he did not. Sharabi and his brother Yossi and their families lived in Be’eri. On October 7, 2023, Eli allowed himself to be kidnapped from his house, leaving his two teen daughters, Noiya, 16, and Yahel, 13, and his wife, Lianne, in the hope that they would survive. His brother Yossi was also captured, with his wife and daughters, too, left behind.
From there, tragedy unfolded. Lianne and the girls were murdered, holding each other in their home in Be’eri. Yossi, whose daughters and wife survived, was killed in captivity, reportedly by an Israeli airstrike. His body is still being held by Hamas. Eli’s brother, Sharon, and his nieces all fought for him tirelessly for almost 500 days. When he returned last month, so many felt a primal fear for Eli: Does he know what happened to his family? How will he survive once he does? How does anyone?
None of us really knew Eli Sharabi, but an entire nation tuned into a recent one-hour interview with Israel’s most respected reporter, Ilana Dayan, on her show “Uvda” (“Fact”) — an interview that’s now available to stream in full with English subtitles on the channel’s website.
As Dayan, a veteran journalist with decades of experience, hugged Sharabi, she couldn’t hold back her emotions. Gently, she tried to ask him what was on and off limits, what topics she should avoid to respect his recovery. But Sharabi, still physically recovering from the brutal conditions he was held in, waved her off. From the beginning, the rule around him has been this: “Nobody walks on eggs shells around me.” No topic, he said, was out of bounds.
So Dayan asked him everything. About the conditions of his captivity — he was held with three other men most of the time, his feet shackled since the day he got to Gaza, receiving at times a mere bowl of pasta a day. He encouraged everyone watching to think about what a gift it is to open a fully stocked fridge, saying, “It’s a whole world.” He talked about the torture he endured, which was often exacerbated by pronouncements by Israeli politicans like Itamar Ben Gvir, who vowed to worsen the conditions of Palestinian detainees. He talked of the brutal beating from a guard, who discovered his family had been killed by an IDF airstrike, that took months to recover from.
Sharabi spoke of the logistics of captivity — how he realized that no one could be rescued from the Hamas tunnels, the many calculations he made about potential escape. He spoke of slain hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who he spent just three days of captivity in the tunnels with, and something that Hersh said that hasn’t left him to this day: “When there’s a purpose, you always find the how.” He revealed that he has since talked to slain hostage Almog Sarusi’s parents, telling them how amazing he was. Rachel and Jon Goldberg-Polin have also spoken of their touching conversations with Sharabi.
He spoke a lot about the hostages that he was fighting for, especially the one man that he left behind, who he thought of as a son.
Sharabi, 53, spent most of his time in Gaza in a small room with three men. Or Levy, Eliya Cohen and Alon Ohel. All three, unlike Sharabi, were captured from the Nova Festival. Levy’s wife was killed that day, his toddler son left behind at his grandparents. It was difficult and tense, to be in such close quarters and difficult conditions, but Sharabi thought of all three of them as his sons, especially Ohel, the only one left behind, a gifted piano player and a sheltered and sweet young man who shared with Sharabi every detail of his life. “He got into my heart from the first moment,” Sharabi said. “The day I left, the terrorists tore him from my arms. He said he was happy for me.” Sharabi promised to fight for Ohel — flying all the way to the White House to meet with President Trump in an attempt to advocate for his release along with the rest of the hostages. He also met with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who told him he watched his Uvda interview and was very moved by it.
Sharabi talked about how necessary it was not only to bring the rest of the hostages back home, but to get to the bottom of everything that happened on October 7. “A state inquiry committee is not a question of yes or no,” he said in the interview. “Just do it,” he added.
In the interview, Sharabi also spoke of his daughters and wife. A social worker he knew before October 7, whom he met with when he first got back to Israel, was the one who revealed their fate to him. He said he was not angry, but grateful to have had 18 years with the British volunteer in the kibbutz whom he fell in love with and built a life with, and felt gratitude for every day and year he had with his wonderful girls. His only regret, he told Dayan, was those last moments of terror with his girls, seeing their terrified faces. He wishes he could go back and tell them, “Never again,” and take them somewhere safe, to do whatever he needed to do to protect them.
” I hope they didn’t suffer, that it was quick and that they weren’t in pain,” he shared. “I hope they’re in a good place, and I’m sure they’re wishing for a good life for me.”
Perhaps the most heartbreaking moment, aside from that recollection in the interview, came when Dayan and Sharabi stood together on a balcony in Kfar HaMaccabiah, where he was convalescing at the time. “I returned to a country going through trauma,” he told her, the sun beating on their faces. “You returned to a different country,” she acquiesced.
“A better one?” he wondered, before Dayan’s silence and facial expression told him all he needed to know. I don’t know how to answer that question, but it seems to me that people like Eli Sharabi are what the country needs to be better.
You can watch the entire interview with Sharabi on Vimeo.
