‘Hostage’: From a place of darkness

Hostage by Eli Sharabi. (Image: Wall Street Journal)

Sun, 12 Oct 2025

By Tunku Varadarajan“I’ll come back!” shouts Eli Sharabi to his wife and two daughters as Hamas terrorists drag him through the front door of his little house in Kibbutz Be’eri, a hitherto blissful community 3 miles from Gaza. It is the morning of the Jewish high holiday Simchat Torah. The family is still in pyjamas when five men with balaclavas and Kalashnikov rifles burst into their mamad, or safe room. “Like almost every household safe room in Israel,” Mr Sharabi later recounts, “you can’t...

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