From the Liveblog of
Saturday, January 20, 2024
Freed hostage recounts time in captivity with Yossi Sharabi: ‘He always tried to care for us’
Former hostage Amit Shani, 16, recalled his time in Hamas captivity in Gaza for more than 50 days, with his Kibbutz Be’eri neighbor Yossi Sharabi, whose death was announced this week, and with 18-year-old Ofir Engel.
Engel, from Jerusalem, was visiting his girlfriend Yuval Sharabi on October 7, and was taken together with Yossi Sharabi and Eli Sharabi, Yuval’s father, who remains in Hamas captivity, as well as Shani, whose family lives next door to the Sharabis.
Speaking to Channel 12 in an interview tonight, Shani says Sharabi “paid a price he didn’t deserve — he was abducted, held for over 100 days, and in the end he was murdered there.”
“It was a comfort that he was there… he always tried to care for us,” says Shani, in reference to himself and to Engel.
“Things felt safer for us with him there,” says Shani, who turned 16 while in captivity.
The remaining hostages in Gaza “don’t deserve any of this, they were abandoned once” in that their abduction took place, “and now they are being abandoned again, for over 100 days. Some are being killed there,” he says.
“This is the most urgent matter that needs to be addressed as quickly as possible,” he says.
On his time as a hostage with Engel and Sharabi, Shani says the three stayed together and “tried to encourage each other” to hold on, “to tell each other it would be ok.”
He says that when he realized they weren’t going to be killed for now, “I sort of calmed down because I thought a deal [to secure their release] would only take a few days.”
But the weeks dragged on. At first, he says, Sharabi convinced their captors to supply them with a radio but it was taken away when Israel launched a ground offensive in Gaza in late October.
The trio was held in an apartment, he says, until he and Engel were freed in late November in a Qatar-brokered truce deal.
They were not able to say farewell to Sharabi, he recalls.
