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

Over the past three years, hundreds of Jewish hostages have been released from captivity across the Middle East, including Israeli hostages held in Gaza and Israeli-Russian researcher Elizabeth Tsurkov, who was released after more than two years in captivity in Iraq. 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 terrorists 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’s 2023 invasion, USCIRF said that the Houthis transferred Marhabi to a prison ward with extremists 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

The experience caused all his teeth to fall out. Inhumane prison conditions have also worsened his kidney and lung conditions. After the October 7th Hamas attacks on Israel, Houthi authorities transferred Marhabi to a more dangerous ward with extremist prisoners who threatened him; after a ten-day hunger strike, authorities placed him in solitary confinement.

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 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."