From the Liveblog of
Friday, February 28, 2025
Freed hostage whose wife and daughters were killed on Oct. 7 says he’s ‘not angry’
Freed hostage Eli Sharabi says he became especially close with 24-year-old Alon Ohel while they and two other Israelis were held hostage in Gaza under cramped, painful conditions.
“I adopted him from the first minute,” Sharabi says. “24/7 together. I know everything about him and his family.”
Sharabi, 53, tells Channel 12’s “Uvda” investigative program the men were able to draw strength from one another. But Ohel took it very hard when he learned that Sharabi and the two others, Or Levy and Eliya Cohen, were being released.
Sharabi says that when he was released with Levy on February 8, Ohel grabbed him and refused to let go until their guard tore him away. He says there were “moments of hysteria” and it took about 15 minutes to calm him down.
“It was a very hard moment,” he says. “He said he was happy for me. I promised him I won’t leave him there. I will fight for him.” Cohen was released two weeks later, leaving Ohel alone.
Sharabi, who lost over 30 kilograms (66 pounds) in captivity, says terrorists held the four hostages in iron chains, and sometimes beat or humiliated them, and they subsisted for months on a single plate of pasta each day.
He says that the hunger pains were unbearable and that getting his captors to give them a dried-out date or a quarter of a piece of bread felt like a victory.
“You could know what happened in the news just from their conduct,” Sharabi says when asked if their captors were exposed to Israeli media, “and therefore… [Israeli leaders’] comments in the media have a lot of power.”
“Any irresponsible remark, the first to suffer [the consequences] was us,” he continued. “[The captors] come to us and say, ‘They’re not giving our prisoners food, you won’t eat. They’re beating our prisoners, we’ll beat you. They don’t get a shower, you won’t get a shower.’ It’s all the time there.”
Sharabi was abducted on October 7, 2023, from his home in Kibbutz Be’eri. Sharabi says he had no access to the news and only learned after his release that his wife and two daughters were killed in the Hamas-led attack, and that his brother was kidnapped that day and later died in captivity, with his body still held in Gaza.
Despite the pain, he says that he feels lucky to be alive and fortunate for the time he spent with his wife Lianne, and daughters, Noiya and Yahel.
“I’m not angry,” he says. “I was lucky I had Lianne for 30 years, I was lucky I had those amazing daughters for years.”
The Times of Israel Community.