Eli Hai was born in Jerusalem in 1952, four years after the establishment of the Israeli state. He grow up in a refugee absorption camp in the outskirts of Jerusalem, where his poor family lived in tin shack, and spent most of days outdoors, picking edible plants in the fields and forbidden fruit from the orchards to feed his hunger, or sneaking into the cinema through the bathroom window, in order to watch a movie he couldn’t afford. He was recruited to the Israeli army without graduating from high school, and served in the Israeli Air Force. His Squadron took a fatal hit in the Yom Kippur War, and a large part of its aircrew was killed taken captive. With the conclusion of his service, he began to catch up on his matriculation exams and got married. He studied Economics and Accounting in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with the help of a scholarship that required him to volunteer in Ramle Prison, where he became a tutor for life-sentenced prisoners, convicted for murder. After his graduation, he began working for the Israeli Tax Authority, and later opened an accountant office, where he works to this day. He also worked as a lecturer for accountancy and taxes for 17 years.
In 2004 he began writing his first book, which grew out of his strong desire to revisit his family’s past in Iraq. The result, Missing Days, is a strong love story that begins in Iraq in the 1940’s and ends in Israel, in the days following it’s independence. Missing Days received outstanding reviews from its readers, which motivated Eli to keep writing. The result is Lies from the Attic, an intriguing love story placed in contemporary times, across the U.S and Israel.