Episode 49: Finding hope in the tunnel of Hamas, with Eli Sharabi

Ask Haviv Anything

Haviv Rettig Gur

History

4.9 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2025

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On October 7, 2023, Eli Sharabi's home was surrounded by Hamas terrorists. As he was dragged into Gaza, he shouted to his wife Leanna and two daughters Noiya and Yahel that "no matter what they do to me, I'll be back."

It was only in February 2025, as he arrived back in Israel after enduring 491 days of physical and psychological torture at the hands of his captors, that he learned that his family was murdered that day.

Eli's new book, "Hostage," is the first comprehensive account of the experience of an Israeli hostage. It contains unique insights about the experience of captivity, about how hostages supported one another and searched for hope in the dark tunnels, about the world-conquering fantasies and fondness for American movies of their Hamas captors, about near-lynchings by ordinary Gazans, about Hamas's expectation that the war that followed their attack would be a short one and their desperate hope that Trump will force an end to the war.

This episode was sponsored by Doug and Fabienne Silverman in memory of the Jewish community of Rhodes, which was all but destroyed in the Holocaust. Fabienne’s mother Maggy’s family came from the ancient Sephardi community on the island, which the family visited in the summer of 2025 to learn about their roots.

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If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at haviv@askhavivanything.com⁠.

Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everybody. Welcome to a very special episode of Ask Habib Anything. We are recording
0:10.3	on October 7 and I have with me Elie Sharabi, a man who spent 491 days in Hamas captivity
0:17.4	after he was taken from Kibbutz Be'eri, a man who lost his family on October 7.
0:24.9	We're going to dive into all the difficult pictures.
0:28.5	I think Eli entered Israeli consciousness most powerfully in his release.
0:34.8	Everybody knew the names and we've talked about, but seeing his emaciated form,
0:40.4	how he was treated by Hamas, we're going to talk about that, about the family, about his
0:45.0	extraordinary new book, hostage. It was a runaway bestseller in Hebrew, and it is now out in English,
0:51.4	and it has so many rich, complex insights. It's the first book published by a hostage to come out of Hamas captivity.
0:58.7	And so let's get into it.
1:00.5	Before we dive into the conversation with Elie on this two-year anniversary of the October 7 massacre,
1:08.5	I want to tell you that we have a sponsor this week that is, I think,
1:13.4	very powerful and poignant. It's a family that took the time to tell itself, to tell its
1:18.9	new generation its own amazing story in the 20th century. And I want to thank them not just for
1:23.8	the sponsorship, but for sharing that story. The 20th century sent a lot of Jews on very strange and unexpected paths.
1:31.2	They started out not speaking generally English and Hebrew and ended up with almost all of them
1:35.7	speaking either English or Hebrew.
1:37.7	And those many tortuous paths they made to many different places in the world is also
1:42.0	part of the story of this family.
1:43.4	The episode was sponsored by Doug and Fabien Silverman in memory of the Jewish community of Rhodes,
1:49.0	a Sephardi community, where Fabian's mother, Maggie's family came from.
1:54.0	Much of the community perished during World War II when the community was rounded up and sent to Auschwitz.
	...

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