Yossi Sharabi, 53: Surfer and soccer fan who ‘was all heart’

Yossi Sharabi, 53, from Kibbutz Be’eri, was kidnapped from his home on October 7 and slain in captivity several months later. His body was returned to Israel in October 2025.

He and his family holed up inside their reinforced room as terrorists rampaged through the kibbutz. In the early afternoon, the gunmen stormed into the house, murdered their dog and brought the entire family outside onto the lawn at gunpoint.

Yossi was last seen that Saturday morning being taken to Gaza in a black vehicle along with Ofir Engel, his daughter’s boyfriend, who had been visiting the family for the weekend, and a neighbor, Amit Shani. The rest of his family was spared.

Ofir and Amit were freed in a weeklong truce in November 2023. Amit later said that “it was a comfort that [Yossi] was there… he always tried to care for us,” and that “things felt safer for us with him there.”

Separately, terrorists took Yossi’s brother, Eli Sharabi, hostage to Gaza from his home in Be’eri, and murdered Eli’s wife and two daughters, Lianne, Noiya and Yahel. Eli was freed from captivity in February 2025.

Also on October 7, Yossi’s nephew on his wife’s side, Idan Herman, was murdered while trying to flee the Supernova music festival.

In January 2024, Hamas published a propaganda video featuring Yossi, claiming that he and fellow hostage Itay Svirsky had been killed in an Israeli airstrike. Two days later, Israeli authorities confirmed that Yossi had been killed in captivity. His date of death is believed to be January 10, 2024.

Several weeks later, the IDF stated that Yossi was likely inadvertently killed as a result of an IDF strike, but it could not definitively confirm his cause of death.

Yossi and Itay were held captive together with Noa Argamani, who was rescued by IDF troops in June 2024. After her return, Noa said that “Yossi didn’t survive” the airstrike which hit an adjacent building, and Itay was murdered by his captors several days later.

On October 13, 2025, Yossi’s remains were returned to Israel by Hamas. He was finally buried in Kibbutz Be’eri on October 27.

Yossi is survived by his wife, Nira, their three daughters, Yuval, Ofir and Oren, his brothers Eli and Sharon, sisters Osnat and Hila, and his mother, Chana.

Yossi was born and raised in southern Tel Aviv. As a young man he worked for a moving company in the US, until he returned to Israel following 9/11. He decided to settle in Be’eri, following his brother Eli, who had moved there as a teenager.

He worked at the Be’eri printing house, first as a machine operator and later as the marketing director. On the kibbutz he met Nira, another transplant, and they married and built their live together in the kibbutz, raising their three daughters.

“We liked being so close,” Eli wrote in his memoir, Hostage, of his brother. “It was good for our girls. We did family trips together, shared family meals. Our daughters were as close as sisters. The future felt wide open, beautiful — and far away.”

His family said Yossi had strong ties to his faith, observed religious traditions and played a role in the kibbutz’s synagogue. He was a big fan of the Maccabi Tel Aviv, Real Madrid, and Manchester United soccer teams and he loved extreme sports, particularly surfing.

“Yossi was all heart, a lover of humanity,” his brother, Sharon, told the Haaretz newspaper. “When you were with him, you couldn’t be sad or upset, because he would immediately give you a hug and make you feel secure.”

The three brothers were united by their love for soccer, he said, recalling that they would “play outside from the moment we got back from school until night.”

Sharon said that Yossi loved to live on the edge: “There’s no extreme sport he didn’t try his hand at… Go to the most dangerous river in the world and you’d find him there, rafting. Over the past few years, he was mainly into surfing.”

His wife, Nira, told Haaretz that she misses “life with Yossi, the knight of my dreams. The man with whom I planned to travel across Australia in a mobile home, the man I imagined growing old with. Now my expectation is a lot more modest: that we will be able to bury him in a worthy place, to mourn him properly, and start to live life anew – in a different way.”

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