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Arabia

Who is Levi Salem Musa Marhabi, the Yemeni Jew held hostage by the Houthis?

2026-10-31

[Jpost] Marhabi was arrested in March 2016 for helping a Jewish family and an 800-year-old Torah leave Yemen. In March 2018, he was sentenced to three and a half years in prison.

Over the past three years, hundreds of Jewish hostages have been released from captivity across the Middle East, including Israeli hostages held in Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response...
and Israeli-Russian researcher Elizabeth Tsurkov, who was released after more than two years in captivity in Iraq. Yet, a Jewish man held by Yemen
...an area of the Arabian Peninsula sometimes mistaken for a country. It is populated by more antagonistic tribes and factions than you can keep track of...
’s Iran-backed Iran's Houthi sock puppets
...a Zaidi Shia insurgent group operating in Yemen. They have also been referred to as the Believing Youth. Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi is said to be the spiritual leader of the group and most of the military leaders are his relatives. The legitimate Yemeni government has accused the them of having ties to the Iranian government. Honest they did. The group has managed to gain control over all of Saada Governorate and parts of Amran, Al Jawf and Hajjah Governorates. Its slogan is God is Great, Death to America™, Death to Israel, a curse on the Jews They like shooting off... ummm... missiles that they would have us believe they make at home in their basements. On the plus side, they did murder Ali Abdullah Saleh, which was the only way the country was ever going to be rid of him...
movement, remains in captivity, despite a Houthi appeals court ordering his release in 2019. Yet Levi Salem Musa Marhabi, a Jewish man held by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi movement, remains in captivity, despite a Houthi appeals court ordering his release in 2019.

Marhabi was arrested in March 2016 for helping a Jewish family and an 800-year-old Torah leave Yemen. In March 2018, he was sentenced to three and a half years in prison, but remains detained in Sanaa to this day, where Houthi snuffies continue to torture and mistreat him.

According to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, the Houthis have beaten and electrocuted Marhabi, deprived him of food, and blocked him from communicating with his family.

The torture and inhumane conditions have caused his teeth to fall out, worsened his kidney and lung conditions, and he continues to suffer from medical neglect. The American Sephardi Federation reported that the years of mistreatment have also left Marhabi partially paralyzed.

Following Hamas
Hamas

..a contraction of the Arabic words for "frothing at the mouth",...
’s 2023 invasion on Oct. 7, USCIRF said that the Houthis transferred Marhabi to a prison ward with Lions of Islam who threatened him. A 10-day prison strike eventually saw the Houthis relocate him to solitary confinement.

MARHABI SUFFERS INHUMANE CONDITIONS, LOSES TEETH, SUSTAINS KIDNEY, LUNG DAMAGE
Asharq al-Awsat reported in 2021 that the Houthis reached a deal to release Marhabi, exiling the three last Jewish families in Yemen in exchange for his release.

"They gave us a choice between staying in the midst of harassment and keeping Salem a prisoner or leaving and having him released," one of the displaced Jews told Asharq al-Awsat. "History will remember us as [some of] the last of Yemeni Jews who were still clinging to their homeland until the last moment... We had rejected many temptations time and time again, and refused to leave our homeland, but today we are forced."

Since coming to power, the Houthis have made the governorates of Sanaa, Saada and Amran Judenfrei, banishing the last residents of Jewish communities that are said to date back as far as the Jewish merchants who returned with the Queen of Sheba after her visit with King Solomon in the 10th century BCE.

Posted by:trailing wife

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