Choose Life    

Eli Sharabi didn’t choose the massacre, didn’t request that his family be slaughtered, and didn’t ask to be kidnapped. But there was one choice he knew he could still make, even as he was doubled over in pain, chained and shackled, deep in the bowels of a Hamas dungeon. He could stand on the side of humanity, compassion, and faith, and when that happened, he knew he was never truly captive

Four hundred and ninety-one days — of hope buried dozens of meters underground, in the shadow of the dregs of humanity. Of waking up every morning to an unfathomable reality. And then, an entire nation watched as hostage Eli Sharabi returned to an excruciating present of pain and loss.

But whoever thought that  Hamas’s cynical stage — where Eli Sharabi was forced to accept some “souvenirs” in advance of his release on February 8 — would frame the freed hostage’s future,  it turns out that the Eli Sharabi we meet this week is far from broken. And the more we learn about the vast pain and grief he has endured, the greater the admiration for the spiritual strength, determination, gratitude, and forward-focused perspective of this eternal optimist.

Sharabi, 53, was abducted from his home in Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7, 2023, during Hamas’s onslaught. His wife, Lianne, and daughters Noya, 16, and Yahel, 13, were murdered soon afterward. His brother Yossi was also kidnapped and later murdered by his captors, who are still holding his body.

Sharabi only found out about the murder of his family after stepping into the Red Cross vehicle that would finally take him to safety. “I imagined my wife and girls running to me,” he says of one of his most shattering moments. “But of course, that didn’t happen. Still, I’m glad I didn’t know they were dead. Because thinking that I would return to them is what kept me going through every horrible day in captivity.”