Hostage Eli Sharabi was starved and beaten by Hamas. But even worse cruelty came after he was released

During his 491 days in the literal dark — starved, beaten and held captive in a Gaza tunnel network hundreds of feet underground — Eli Sharabi had one hope keeping him going: being reunited with his wife, Lianne, and his daughters.

Noiya was 16 and Yahel was 13 when Hamas terrorists tore through the family’s home in Kibbutz Be’eri, in southern Israel, on October 7, 2023, and dragged their father away. The last memory he had of his girls as he cried out, ” “I’ll come back!” was “their eyes frozen in horror.”

“The belief that they’re alive, my concern for them, gives me strength,” Sharabi recalls in “Hostage,” his memoir account of being held hostage.

When the business manager finally found out in February of this year that he would be going home, he allowed himself to imagine the family starting over again in England, his wife’s birthplace, so his girls could live without fear.

He didn’t know that Israel was at war or that 101 of his Be’eri neighbors had lost their lives in the October 7 attacks that left some 1,200 dead. Right before his release, he learned that his brother, Yossi, was killed in captivity.

Ahead of a release ceremony in Gaza, where he recalls depraved spectators hooting, a Hamas official coached Sharabi — who weighed just 97 pounds — on his response to questions about being free: “I say I’m really excited to see my wife and daughter.”

“It was our last humiliation,” he told The Post of the propaganda spectacle. But “I imagined my daughters and Lianne would be running to me. I was very excited.”

When Sharabi was finally turned over, an Israeli social worker told him his mother and sister were waiting for him. And his wife and daughters?

“Your mother and sister will tell you,” he recalled the woman saying.

Immediately, he understood that they were gone. 

“It was like a five kilo hammer on my head,” Sharabi, 53, told The Post.

Lianne, Noiya and Yahel had been fatally shot, along with the family’s dog, Mocha, at their home on October 7.

It’s impossible to say how captivity would have been different had Sharabi known. But, he said, “I promised my girls I would survive.”

Shackled, 24/7, in iron-link chains that ripped the skin on his legs and with his hands tied in ropes so tight they “branded my flesh,” Sharabi said all-consuming starvation was, physically, the hardest part of captivity. 

The hostages survive on meager scraps — typically, one and a half pieces of pita bread a day.

“Sometimes we waited 30 hours for the next meal, the next very dry pita bread and salt water to drink,” he said. “If you find any crumb on the floor you take it and eat it. You beg for food all the time.”

But, Sharabi writes, he knew that his captors needed to keep him alive for leverage.

So, with his “belly caving inward,” finding a razor gave him the inspiration to stage a fake fainting episode.

He slashed his eyebrow until it bled, then pretended to lose consciousness and collapse. The stunt netted an extra half of pita for the next week.

“It was hell,” Sharabi said of the malnutrition. It got to a point he recalled, where he felt, “You can break my hands, my legs, my ribs, no problem. Just give me more food.”

One day Sharabi spied a captor on the phone, receiving what must have been bad news.

“He lets loose on me, beating me senseless. Punching me. Kicking me in the ribs,” he writes, recalling how fellow hostages tried to shield him. “I curl up, screaming in agony. Trying to crawl away, my feet still shackled.”

That episode left Sharabi unable to sit or stand upright for a month.

The younger terrorists, he concluded, were crueler — “their treatment is harsher and more degrading” — than the old guard.

“Nonstop psychological terror” was a favorite tactic, he writes. “They try to make us despair, to believe we’ve been truly abandoned and no one cares we exist anymore.”

The Hamas guards taunted their Jewish hostages, insisting they recite verses of the Quran in exchange for slices of fruit.

“It’s a thin line between dignity and ego,” Sharabi said of the primal desire for food.

Even the knowledge that he was worth more alive didn’t always quell the fear that his captors — who continued to conduct strip-searches — could snap and kill him at any moment.

“It was in the air all the time, every day,” he told The Post, adding that the terrorists would wave their guns, gesturing they’d “slaughter us.”  

One routinely claimed to have spotted Sharabi’s family at rallies on TV: “They’re fighting for you. You’ve got amazing daughters.”

In those moments, he let his mind wander to his previously quiet life as CFO of Kibbutz Be’eri, where he’d lived since he was 16.

Now, not only is the dream of returning to that shattered, so is his hope for peace.

“I really wanted to live in peace with my neighbors,” he said. “The people who burn, rape … it will take at least another two generations to educate them to love life and not to hate” before things turn around.

“I didn’t meet anyone who was uninvolved in Gaza, even the civilians,” he said, recalling kids in the streets throwing shoes at the hostages as they were brought into the city on October 7. He was, he said,“nearly lynched” by the “fevered, rage-filled mob [that] wanted to tear me apart.”

But even after all he has lost, Sharabi said, “I don’t have the privilege to cry in bed all day. I got my second chance. I’m free, I’m alive. Freedom is priceless.”