Haunting eyewitness accounts of one of the decade’s most catastrophic events.
A collection of intimate stories about the Israeli victims in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.
With contributions from Cohen, Haaretz journalist Yaron has interviewed countless people and their families to craft this moving look at the lives and harrowing deaths of Israelis and guest workers on 10/7. The author alternates the heartbreaking, immediate profiles with some history of Israel as well as of the kibbutzim, the small activist, agricultural communities where many of the victims were struck. “The terrorists of Hamas murdered and destroyed the very communities that did more than any others to promote peace between the two peoples,” she writes. Moreover, in story after story, Yaron relates how many victims of 10/7 descended from Holocaust survivors or had moved to Israel for their safety. Beginning with Sderot, she notes how this southern city of immigrants has suffered from Hamas’ onslaught of rockets for many years and how 50 of its citizens were killed on 10/7. A group of elders on a minibus to a Dead Sea resort, many of whom were refugees from the Soviet satellite states, were gunned down on the streets; in Ofakim, one of Israel’s poorest cities, 49 residents were murdered. The author visited Bedouin communities in the Negev, where missiles rained down on the vulnerable residents, as well as the Kibbutz Alumim, where a group of Nepalese students working the fields were killed. The most horrendous toll of all was the 364 people murdered at the Nova music festival site (another 40 were kidnapped). “In the minds of many Israelis, including leading politicians,” writes Yaron, “disengagement from Gaza was the original sin, and a direct line connects Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the strip to the far-right Judicial Reform and massacre eighteen years later.”
Haunting eyewitness accounts of one of the decade’s most catastrophic events.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781250366283
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.
Enduring the unthinkable.
This memoir—the first by an Israeli taken captive by Hamas on October 7, 2023—chronicles the 491 days the author was held in Gaza. Confined to tunnels beneath war-ravaged streets, Sharabi was beaten, humiliated, and underfed. When he was finally released in February, he learned that Hamas had murdered his wife and two daughters. In the face of scarcely imaginable loss, Sharabi has crafted a potent record of his will to survive. The author’s ordeal began when Hamas fighters dragged him from his home, in a kibbutz near Gaza. Alongside others, he was held for months at a time in filthy subterranean spaces. He catalogs sensory assaults with novelistic specificity. Iron shackles grip his ankles. Broken toilets produce an “unbearable stink,” and “tiny white worms” swarm his toothbrush. He gets one meal a day, his “belly caving inward.” Desperate for more food, he stages a fainting episode, using a shaving razor to “slice a deep gash into my eyebrow.” Captors share their sweets while celebrating an Iranian missile attack on Israel. He and other hostages sneak fleeting pleasures, finding and downing an orange soda before a guard can seize it. Several times, Sharabi—51 when he was kidnapped—gives bracing pep talks to younger compatriots. The captives learn to control what they can, trading family stories and “lift[ing] water bottles like dumbbells.” Remarkably, there’s some levity. He and fellow hostages nickname one Hamas guard “the Triangle” because he’s shaped like a SpongeBob SquarePants character. The book’s closing scenes, in which Sharabi tries to console other hostages’ families while learning the worst about his own, are heartbreaking. His captors “are still human beings,” writes Sharabi, bravely modeling the forbearance that our leaders often lack.
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780063489790
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harper Influence/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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