Eli Sharabi’s escape from Hamas’ hell after 491 days in captivity stands as a grim reminder that evil wears many faces but one consistent heart: murderous, cruel, and merciless. Taken during the October 7, 2023 massacre and finally handed over in February 2025, Sharabi’s survival and return should shame every policymaker who soft-pedals terrorism or speaks in moral equivalence. Americans who love freedom must look at his story and recognize the stakes of appeasement and weakness abroad.
The details of what Sharabi endured are bone-chilling: near-starvation, iron chains, beatings, and being paraded by his captors for propaganda while he weighed barely a fraction of his normal weight. He told the world how Hamas reduced human beings to bargaining chips and how the world watched while men were buried alive under tunnels of terror. There is no room for euphemisms — this was torture inflicted by an organization the West still refuses to call what it is.
Sharabi’s personal tragedy makes his survival all the more heartbreaking: he learned only after his release that his wife Lianne and their two daughters were murdered on October 7, and his brother Yossi was also killed in the aftermath. The image of a freed man discovering the slaughter of his own family is a rebuke to any institution that pretends this conflict is balanced on some noble moral scale. We owe it to victims like the Sharabis to stop normalizing murder and to demand accountability from those who enable it.
In testimony before international bodies, Sharabi accused Hamas of stealing humanitarian aid and using it for their own ends, a charge that should rile every taxpayer who expects aid to help civilians rather than feed terrorists. His firsthand account undercuts the comfortable narratives pushed by some global institutions and exposes the deadly efficiency with which Hamas converts charity into ammunition. If governments and international agencies won’t confront this theft, then democracies must.
Beyond the physical torture, Sharabi says his captors tried to force religious conversion — demanding they read verses from the Quran in exchange for food — and he resisted, clinging to Jewish prayers and the Shema through every day of deprivation. That quiet, stubborn fidelity to faith under brutal duress is the kind of courage our country should celebrate and defend, not relativize in the name of misplaced cultural sensitivity. The brave refusal to barter one’s beliefs for survival should inspire conservatives who value religious liberty and moral clarity.
Sharabi has turned his ordeal into testimony and a memoir called Hostage, set for international release on the anniversary of the October 7 massacre, so the world cannot forget what happened nor the identities of those responsible. His book is not a call for vengeance but a demand for remembrance and righteous action — that the truth be preserved and the living be protected. If Western leaders take anything from his pages, let it be resolve: stand with allies, cut off support to terrorists, and ensure no more families suffer what the Sharabis have endured.
Patriots should use this moment to push for policies that match the moral clarity of survivors like Sharabi: robust aid to allies, ruthless action against terrorist networks, and a refusal to fund or empower organizations that turn aid into terror. Let Eli Sharabi’s name be a rallying cry — not for geopolitical nuance, but for justice, for the safe return of remaining hostages, and for an America that refuses to wink at barbarism under any diplomatic pretense. The nation that remembers and responds is the nation that keeps freedom alive.
