I am going to meet the saddest man in the world, or so I think. On October 7 2023, Eli Sharabi lost his wife and two daughters as Hamas terrorists rampaged through their kibbutz near Israel’s southern border, burning, beheading, gleefully slaughtering. The sorrow is unimaginable. But it gets worse. Eli was taken hostage before his family were murdered. For the next 491 days, most of the time spent in a tunnel beneath Gaza, he was sustained by the thought that, if only he could survive, he would be reunited with Lianne, who was born and brought up in Bristol, and their beloved girls, 16-year-old Noiya, and Yahel, just turned 13. “I’ll come back!” he shouted as the brutes dragged him away.
And he was as good as his word. There is a heart-stopping moment in Eli’s book, Hostage, where he returns from the underworld, literally almost half the man he was, and, suddenly, he knows. The social worker who welcomes him at the hostage handover point says his mother and sister are waiting for him. Eli says he wants his wife and daughters, and the social worker says his mother and sister will explain.
“It’s all clear in that moment, right there, standing in front of her. I understand everything. I understand it in my bones. I understand it from head to toe. I understand it, and I feel the pain pulsating through my broken body, a pain without a name and without form, and nobody needs to say another word.”
He made it, and they did not. Eli’s book, one of the most compelling and unflinching you will ever read, is dedicated to the memory of Eli’s girls and to Yossi, his brother, who was also taken hostage and was killed. Yossi’s body is in Gaza, one of the 48 remaining hostages, 20 of whom Israel believes are still alive.
Hostage is the fastest-selling book in Israeli history, with more than 20,000 copies purchased there already. It is published at a time when the country is exhausted by almost two years of war, as well as deeply divided on the Gaza policy of the Netanyahu government.
The Sharabis lived on Kibbutz Be’eri, an idyllic, commune-style village just three miles from the Gaza Strip. “It was a piece of heaven. A great place for the children to grow up. An amazing community, all caring for each other,” Eli says. He moved there from Tel Aviv when he was 16, seeking a meaningful life away from the bustle of the city, and went on to assume management roles, including treasurer, for the thriving collective. In 1995, he met Lianne Brisley, who had come to volunteer at the kibbutz. “Love at first sight,” sighs Eli, his inky eyes moistening at the memory. Lianne was not Jewish, and she never converted, although she rapidly learnt Hebrew. “We only spoke English when we argued,” he smiles.
A day of carnage
October 7 2023 was just another Saturday for the family. They were woken at 6.29am by an alarm. Rocket attacks from Gaza happened very occasionally, so they knew the drill. Still in their pyjamas, with Mocca the dog running around, Eli and Lianne got the girls into the safe room. “We were sure the alarm would finish in five minutes,” Eli recalls. Even when they saw TV reports saying terrorists had broken through the border fence, and videos of attacks at the nearby Nova music festival, they didn’t start to panic. “I told the girls the army will arrive as always when we need them, so not to worry.” Eli padded to the kitchen to make a drink to soothe everyone’s nerves. “English breakfast tea, it’s our tradition to start every day because of Lianne. Noiya and Yahel, they love English tea.” (He refers to the girls in the present tense; they are still alive for their father, and maybe they always will be.)
Eli returned to the safe room with a teapot. “Kids in the kibbutz started to write messages in the WhatsApp group. ‘Somebody shot Mum’, ‘They killed my dad’, ‘Our house is burning’, ‘They’re trying to break in’. We were in shock,” Eli says. The stream of messages charted the savage advance of the terrorists (and the Gazan civilians who were their willing accomplices), while the sound of screams, gunfire and explosions indicated they were getting closer and closer to the Sharabis’ home. Eli and Lianne had a whispered conversation so the girls couldn’t hear. “We had to make a decision.” The parents decided they were not going to put up any resistance if the terrorists broke in. Eli says they presumed that he would be kidnapped or killed, but that their British passports would protect Lianne, Noiya and Yahel.
No comments:
Post a Comment