14 months after hostage son was freed, father says family still held captive by trauma

As families of hostages anxiously follow the unfolding hostage deal, Yoav Engel, father of former captive Ofir Engel, sent a message of support to the families whose loved ones are not on the initial list of 33 hostages being freed in the first phase of the Gaza ceasefire deal. An additional 64 are believed to be held, not all of them alive.

“We are with you until the return of the very last hostage,” said Engel. “There are no living hostages or dead hostages, there are just hostages. And there are still 97 hostages in Gaza.”

The Hamas terror organization was slated to release three female hostages, Romi Leshem Gonen, Doron Steinbrecher and Emily Damari, from Gaza on Sunday afternoon.

Four more hostages will be returned to Israel on the seventh day of the ceasefire, and three hostages will be returned every week for four weeks. Finally, 14 hostages will be returned in the sixth and final week of phase one.

Engel spoke last week with The Times of Israel, reflecting on the difficulties of moving forward from his child’s kidnapping to Gaza by Hamas-led terrorists on October 7, 2023.

“My wife and I turn to each other — it’s so crazy to think we went through this,” said Engel. “When I talk about it, it’s like I’m talking about someone else, it’s like a film. Did this really happen to us?”

The 54 days that Ofir, now 18, spent in captivity threw Engel, his wife Sharon, and Ofir’s two younger sisters into a maelstrom of uncertainty that resonates to this day.

Everything reminds them of he fear, anguish and anxiety of those two months.

Engel knows that he and his family are relatively fortunate. Ofir returned to them healthy and whole, and in a sense, the terrifying chapter was closed.

Except that it wasn’t.

“This will be with us for a long time,” said Engel, who spends part of each week fighting for government funding to pay for his family’s therapy, an ordeal now familiar to many survivors of the October 7 Hamas terror onslaught.

Some 1,200 people were slaughtered in southern Israel that day, and 251 were kidnapped to the Gaza Strip.

Ofir, then 17, was visiting his girlfriend, Yuval Sharabi, on October 7, 2023, at her family’s home in Kibbutz Be’eri. As Hamas terrorists invaded the kibbutz killing 101 residents, burning homes and committing atrocities, Ofir was taken hostage with Yuval’s father Yossi Sharabi and a neighbor’s teenage son.

Ofir and the other teenager were freed on November 29. Yossi Sharabi, 53, remained in captivity and was then killed, possibly by an IDF strike in Gaza, on January 16, 2024.

“[Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu said to me twice that Yossi was alive, that they wouldn’t blow up any place that had living hostages, even if they weren’t sure there was anyone nearby,” said Ofir Engel. “But 29 hostages have been killed that way.”

Now the Engels mourn with the Sharabis while hoping that Yossi Sharabi’s brother, hostage Eli Sharabi, will come home. Eli’s wife and two daughters were killed at their home in Be’eri on October 7.

Eli Sharabi, now 52, is on the list of 33 hostages to be freed in the first phase of the deal.

“I can try and understand how Nira [Sharabi] is doing,” said Engel, referring to Yossi Sharabi’s wife, “yet I can’t even describe how I am. There are no words in Hebrew that describe this. The words don’t exist in our language.”

Engel and his father, Yosef “Jucha” Engel, once an aide to Shimon Peres, are a regular presence at hostage gatherings and rallies, often standing with Sharon Sharabi, the brother of Eli and Yossi Sharabi, holding pictures of his two brothers.

While Engel is back at work as head of the athletics department at Jerusalem’s Shalva organization, working with people with disabilities, he still participates regularly in hostage family circles.

He speaks at various hostage forums and is at the weekly demonstrations in front of the Knesset on Mondays in the struggle to bring the hostages home.

As Rachel Goldberg-Polin, mother of murdered hostage Hersh Golderg-Polin recently remarked, families like theirs are “hostage adjacent.”

It isn’t the first time that Engel and his family have experienced a catastrophic event related to the nation’s security. In 1996, Engel’s younger brother, Yair Engel, died during his naval commando training.

It has now been 28 years since Yair died, and Ofir’s kidnapping induces a different kind of trauma, said Engel.

“When my brother was killed, they knocked on the door and everything that we knew just collapsed, but we also knew what happened next, we buried him and sat shiva [ritual mourning], we went through the motions,” said Engel, who lives with his family and the extended Engel family on Kibbutz Ramat Rachel within the Jerusalem municipality.

When Ofir was taken hostage, it was five days until it became certain that he was a hostage, and 35 days until they had any signs of life from him.

“Every moment we were waiting, wondering if they would find his body but holding onto hope and belief,” said Engel. “In my head, I believed he was alive rather than think otherwise but you don’t know what to do. There’s no rulebook.”

Engel didn’t work during those months.

He’s now back at work but often feels like he’s at loose ends, lacking focus. He speaks about this frequently in meetings with the National Insurance Institute, which grants funds for ongoing therapies, and in Knesset committee meetings, where he discusses the need to help the victims and their extended families.

“They don’t see us as victims because we weren’t there,” said Engel. “This affects everybody, from the victim to the victim’s family, to the grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.”

And yet for the most part, former hostage Ofir is doing well, even though aspects of his future are still uncertain.

He is currently participating in a pre-army service year in the Golan Heights, as is his girlfriend Yuval, although the two are in different programs, said Engel.

Engel thinks back to November 29, 2023, when his son returned home, which also happened to be the senior Engel’s birthday.

“It was the birthday gift to end all birthdays,” said Engel.

On that first day, as they sat in a courtyard of Schneider Hospital, Ofir asked why yellow ribbons were tied to all the branches of a nearby tree.

“He had no idea they were for the hostages,” said Engel.

The next day, Engel took his son to the Hostages Forum offices in Tel Aviv. On the way there, Ofir saw an enormous image of himself magnified on the Azrieli Mall electronic billboard.

“He couldn’t believe it,” said Engel.

Ofir Engel recently did a press tour to promote “Survived to Tell,” a virtual reality experience from the Israel-is organization that includes his account of his ordeal, filmed in the ruins of his girlfriend’s Kibbutz Be’eri home.

“Sometimes he feels he’s telling the story of someone else,” said his father, who keeps a set of the VR goggles in his Jerusalem living room. “He sees his picture on TV and says, ‘There I am.’ It’s very strange for him.”

All these months later, the Engels still feel connected to it all. They’re waiting anxiously for the hostage deal, with hopes that Yuval’s uncle, Eli Sharabi, is still alive and will return home.

“Let’s see if he’s still alive, but then, how will he keep going?” said Engel. “His entire family was killed. Your stomach clenches just thinking about it. But let’s first see that he’s alive.”