Hostage

“I focus and concentrate on one mission: surviving to return home.”

Spoken internally during his abduction, this sentence establishes survival as an organizing principle of the memoir. The phrasing reflects the narrowing of focus under extreme stress, highlighting how purpose becomes Sharabi’s primary psychological anchor amid his experience of extreme violence and uncertainty.

“I’m being dragged into a sea of people who start thumping my head, screaming, trying to rip me limb from limb.”

As Sharabi is forced through Gaza streets by armed captors, the metaphor “sea of people” collapses the crowd into a single, engulfing force, erasing individual faces or motives. The verbs—“thumping,” “screaming,” “rip”—create a breathless escalation that mirrors his sensory overload and panic. The line makes clear that danger in captivity extends beyond militants to volatile public violence.

“This isn’t Stockholm Syndrome. I don’t identify with them. I don’t pity them. I’m not confused about who they are or what they really want.”

After describing moments of negotiation and guarded interaction with his captors, Sharabi interrupts his narrative to reject an anticipated outside reading. The short, parallel sentences read like a formal rebuttal, making it clear that his cooperation is survival-driven. By naming the term explicitly, Sharabi asserts interpretive authority over his experience, signaling that proximity under coercion should not be mistaken for sympathy or ideological confusion.

“I sit down, panting. I can’t believe it. My eyes well up, and I cry.”

This moment marks the first time Sharabi allows himself to break down, triggered by hearing Hebrew voices of other Israeli hostages. The physical response—panting, tears—signals the collapse of emotional containment he has maintained since his abduction. The scene also expands his understanding of the hostage crisis, forcing him to confront the presence of women and children.

“There is always a choice.”

Spoken as Sharabi faces a forced descent into a tunnel where refusal would mean death, the sentence deliberately strains its own meaning. “Choice” here does not imply freedom but a narrow psychological margin—how one meets coercion when the outcome is fixed. This highlights the theme of The Politics of Control in Captivity, as Sharabi has to claim every form of agency possible in a system that’s trying to strip him of his humanity.

“We climb down a long ladder, into the shaft. I’m scared. Every nightmare, every fear, every fevered thought climbs down with me, step by step, down the ladder.”

Sharabi turns the descent into a psychological image, personifying fear as something that “climbs down” alongside him. The triadic repetition (“nightmare,” “fear,” “fevered thought”) intensifies the sense of mental crowding, as if the terror has physical weight. The step-by-step cadence mirrors the ladder rungs, fusing his body’s motion with his mind’s spiraling dread.

“We never see them again. We never hear from them again. Hersh Goldberg-Polin. Almog Sarusi. Ori Danino.”

After fellow hostages are removed from the tunnel under the suggestion of release, Sharabi records their disappearance. The repeated sentence structure emphasizes their absence without needing additional explanation. Listing full names shifts the moment to an act of public witness, resisting the anonymity imposed by captivity and underscoring the memoir’s theme of testimony as an ethical obligation.

“Our mission is to survive.”

Sharabi frames survival as a shared objective rather than an individual instinct, reinforcing his role as a stabilizing presence among the hostages. The simplicity of the sentence gives it authority, functioning as both instruction and mantra. It also redirects emotion away from despair and toward purpose.

“A small act of rebellion. A tiny, orange, sweet victory. Difficult days lie ahead.”

Following the secret theft of a bottle of soda in a deteriorating tunnel, Sharabi matches the scale of the act with clipped, controlled sentences. Sensory details—“orange,” “sweet”—briefly restore pleasure and normalcy in an environment defined by deprivation. The final line immediately reins in celebration, reinforcing the memoir’s discipline: Morale is sustained through small gains, but never allowed to drift into false optimism.

“We are bargaining chips. They need bargaining chips. And they need bargaining chips with a pulse.”

Sharabi articulates this logic after observing captors intervene to address sanitation and illness despite ongoing cruelty. The repetition flattens human life into a single function: leverage. The final clause—“with a pulse”—reduces survival to a biological threshold, clarifying that care is not humane but strategic. The sentence exposes captivity as a system where preservation and degradation operate simultaneously.

“Four men, crammed into one small space. Ankles shackled. Buried under the heavy soil of Gaza.”

The clipped fragments mirror confinement, stacking physical facts into a suffocating image of captivity. Sharabi’s concrete nouns—space, ankles, soil—keep the description visceral rather than abstract. The line also widens from the personal to the geographical, reminding readers that the environment itself becomes part of the prison.

“I don’t know if I feel God in those moments. But I feel power. I feel a connection.”

Spoken during improvised prayer and ritual in the tunnel, the line separates spiritual experience from doctrinal certainty. Sharabi’s hesitancy (“I don’t know if”) gives way to felt effects—“power,” “connection”—grounding belief in continuity rather than theology. In captivity, ritual becomes a means of maintaining identity and coherence when external structures of meaning have collapsed.

“Life’s totally normal outside, did you notice?”

Elia says this after the hostages briefly emerge aboveground and encounter active streets, open shops, and ordinary civilian movement. The casual phrasing heightens the shock, turning normalcy into something alien and destabilizing. Rather than offering comfort, the sight confirms their erasure, underscoring the fact that political terror can persist unnoticed beneath everyday life.

“Hope is never something that comes easily. It’s always something you’ve got to fight for, to work on.”

This frames hope as labor, not a mood or passive wish, highlighting the theme of Caretaking as Resistance. Here, hope is earned through repetition, discipline, and shared practice. The paired verbs “fight” and “work” give hope a physicality that fits the chapter’s survival logic: Rituals (gratitude lists, prayers, routines) become technology for endurance. In context, the line also resists the captors’ strategy of humiliation by redefining optimism as an act of will, not denial.

“We learn to strike a balance when asking for food, swallowing our pride and begging but without degrading ourselves.”

Sharabi describes this calculus after months of hunger make food requests unavoidable. The sentence maps a narrow behavioral line between necessity and self-preservation, where tone and posture become strategic. By framing dignity as something actively maintained, Sharabi shows how identity survives not through defiance, but through controlled self-presentation within humiliation.

“This is Hamas! In the end, it's Hamas we're dealing with. You never know what's true or not. Until we're in the hands of the IDF, nothing, I mean nothing, is certain.”

Sharabi delivers this warning as negotiations appear to advance and optimism spreads among the hostages. The escalating repetition tightens the rule he has learned to live by: Distrust all signals until physically verified. The sentence reveals skepticism not as cynicism, but as emotional survival—a learned defense against hope becoming another source of harm.

“‘There are twenty-five alive and eight dead,’ he says. ‘Just casually, as you do.’”

Sharabi records this statement as a Hamas commander scrolls through hostage images on a laptop during a so-called “identity parade.” The flat arithmetic reduces human lives to inventory, and the dry aside—“Just casually, as you do”—registers moral shock without overt commentary. The understatement intensifies the horror by showing how bureaucratic calm can coexist with catastrophic loss.

“We relieve ourselves in a small cesspit we've dug in the corner.”

Sharabi describes this after being moved to a stripped-down tunnel with no sanitation, where basic survival requires improvisation. The unadorned diction refuses to aestheticize degradation, allowing the act itself to carry its weight and highlighting the theme of testimony as an ethical obligation.

“Eli, it's true. I know for sure that Yossi was killed. I'm sorry.”

The direct address (“Eli”) and the repeated certainty (“true,” “for sure”) strip away Sharabi’s protective skepticism, forcing the loss to land in real time. In context, this confirmation comes after a captor’s claim, and the shift from doubt to verified reality deepens Sharabi’s emotional whiplash and sense of isolation.

“As far as I'm concerned, until the Red Cross hands us to the IDF, this isn't really happening.”

Sharabi repeats this to himself as release appears imminent but remains uncertain. The firm conditional structure functions as emotional containment, limiting hope until it can no longer be taken away. The sentence reflects learned distrust and The Politics of Control in Captivity.

“They’re two-faced, and both faces are savage.”

The metaphor follows a staged release in which captors shield the hostages from a hostile crowd they themselves helped incite. The symmetry of the phrasing sharpens the indictment, rejecting any comforting distinction between “protector” and aggressor. Sharabi captures the psychological dissonance of depending on the same figures who orchestrate terror.

“For the first time, after so long, I see myself in the mirror.”

This moment occurs after Sharabi showers and changes clothes at the IDF reception facility. The plain declarative sentence mirrors the shock of recognition, emphasizing how captivity has delayed even basic self-perception. The mirror becomes a reckoning not only with his identity, but also with the physical toll of his survival.

“I need closure, I think to myself. I need to see it with my own eyes.”

In this passage, the repetition of “I need” underscores Sharabi’s decision to go to the cemetery as an emotional compulsion rather than choice. The line is an extension of his survival logic: Reality must be confronted directly to move believed.