Eli Sharabi’s Hostage, the first memoir of captivity in Gaza in the aftermath of Oct. 7, appeared in Israel in May, just four months after his release; the English translation will be published in the U.S. on the second anniversary of the Hamas attack. A taut, immersive chronicle of endurance, the book also serves as a window into the Israeli view of the war.

The author was pulled away from his wife and two daughters in the first hours of the attack. For the next 491 days, with rare exceptions, the only people Sharabi saw were other hostages and Hamas militants—the same parties that have remained front and center in the viewfinder of Jewish Israelis for two solid years, even as most of the world shifted its focus to the Palestinian civilians also confined in Gaza , and dying in the

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