I Will Come Back

Three years after October 7, the man we waited for is the one now holding the memory of us all.

“I will come back.” Those were the last words Eli Sharabi managed to shout to his daughters on the morning of October 7, 2023, as Hamas terrorists dragged him, blindfolded, out of his home in Kibbutz Be’eri. Minutes earlier, he and his wife Lianne had thrown themselves over Noiya and Yahel, 16 and 13, screaming for the terrorists to stop. When the gunmen took the three of them into the kitchen, Eli managed to tell Lianne not to be afraid. It was the last time he saw them.

Then, for 491 days, he clung to that promise. He was held mostly underground, chained, starved and beaten, and in all that time he saw daylight three times. His captors told him that Lianne and the girls were appearing at the rallies demanding his release, and he turned that image into his reason to wake up every morning. Every day he survived in the tunnel was one day less until he could walk back into his kitchen in Be’eri and hold them.

On February 8, 2025, Hamas paraded him on a stage, surrounded by armed men. He weighed 44 kilos. On the other side, the first thing he asked was for them to bring him his wife and daughters. He was told his mother and sister would explain. In that second, he understood that the promise that had kept him alive for a year and four months no longer had anyone to receive it. They had been murdered on the first day, in the same house he left shouting that he would come back. Three days earlier, his captors had already shown him a photograph of his brother Yossi, also murdered in captivity.

Eli kept his word. He came back. He came back with his body reduced to bone and his soul intact, and there was no one at the door to welcome him.

Eight months later, I wrote an article about waiting. When I wrote it, I was wearing a diskit, the IDF identification tag, against my skin, and I asked G-d for the day I could take it off, the day everyone would be home. I wrote about mothers waiting for a phone call, and I thought of the return as the happy ending of a nightmare. Today I know that, for some, coming back meant arriving at a house where silence has taken the place of voices that loved each other for years.

For many, the call came a few days after that column. On October 13, 2025, the last 20 living hostages came out of Gaza, and Einav Zangauker, the mother who for two years never left Hostages Square, held her son Matan after 738 days and could only repeat the same words: “My life, my life.” Among those who came home that day was Alon Ohel, the young man with whom Eli shared most of his captivity.

For others, the call took longer. In December, when only her brother remained, Shira Gvili said she looked at the other families and saw in their eyes a relief still denied to her own. In that same season, on the last night of Chanukah, hundreds of people lit the eighth candle in the square holding posters with Ran’s face. Ran was already wounded on October 7, and still he went out to defend his neighbors in Alumim. He died fighting. His body came home on January 26, 2026, identified by his teeth after the army exhumed dozens of graves in a cemetery in northern Gaza. His mother, Talik, wrote that her son had been the first to go and the last to come back. On that day, President Isaac Herzog announced that, for the first time since 2014, no Israeli citizen remained captive in Gaza.

Today, October 7, 2026, Eli Sharabi hosts the national ceremony that the October 7 families hold every year in Tel Aviv’s Yarkon Park, paid for with money the public donates out of its own pocket. He explained that he agreed to do it to keep what he promised Lianne, Noiya, Yahel and Yossi: that neither they nor what was done to them will ever be forgotten.

It is all there. Eli made two promises in his life that are worth this column. The first he shouted from the door of his home, and he kept it with a 44-kilo body before an empty kitchen. The second he made before three graves, and tonight he keeps it standing up, microphone in hand, before an entire country. The man we waited for during 491 days is today the one who holds the memory of us all.

This reversal binds me. The duty to wait ended on January 26, with Ran’s return, and gave way to the duty to hold up those who came back. In December 2024, Hamas released a letter attributed to Matan Zangauker. “The darkness is frightening,” it read. “We die 1,000 times a day.” Whoever died a thousand times a day for two years comes back with wounds that no release heals by decree. He comes back with nightmares, with a body that must learn to eat again, with a mother who cries every time he leaves the house. Behind him come the parents who, after two years of marches, received a coffin, and the soldiers who will forever carry the absence of the comrade who walked beside them.

On that basis, this October 7 I ask myself what it means to hold them up from Mexico, nearly 13,000 kilometers from Be’eri. One by one, the posters with the faces of the abducted came down from the walls where we had put them up, and each poster taken down belonged to someone who came home, alive or in the arms of their own. What remains is the duty to know who they are now: to read what they write, to listen to what they tell, to say their names once the world has changed the subject. I also know there are empty houses in Gaza and that this pain has faces. Yet the door to this tragedy was opened by Hamas on that Simchat Torah Saturday, when it walked into a kitchen in Be’eri.

I return, in the end, to the tag. A diskit exists to name the one who wears it when he can no longer say his own name, so that someone can bring him home. For two years I wore it on my skin to remember those who were far away. A year after they came back, I understand what the wish to take it off means: the names that hung from my neck now pass into our hands, and with them it falls to us to keep the promise Eli made before three graves, so that Lianne, Noiya and Yahel will go on having, in every corner of the Jewish People, a home where someone is waiting for them… even though they will not come back.

May their memory, as their lives were, be a blessing. Am Israel Chai.