diff --git a/dspace-oai/src/main/java/org/dspace/xoai/util/ItemUtils.java b/dspace-oai/src/main/java/org/dspace/xoai/util/ItemUtils.java
index 44071872292c..6c5073733aa2 100644
--- a/dspace-oai/src/main/java/org/dspace/xoai/util/ItemUtils.java
+++ b/dspace-oai/src/main/java/org/dspace/xoai/util/ItemUtils.java
@@ -17,11 +17,11 @@
 import java.util.List;
 import java.util.Set;
 import java.util.concurrent.atomic.AtomicBoolean;
+import java.util.regex.Pattern;
 
 import com.lyncode.xoai.dataprovider.xml.xoai.Element;
 import com.lyncode.xoai.dataprovider.xml.xoai.Metadata;
 import com.lyncode.xoai.util.Base64Utils;
-import org.apache.commons.text.StringEscapeUtils;
 import org.apache.logging.log4j.LogManager;
 import org.apache.logging.log4j.Logger;
 import org.dspace.app.util.factory.UtilServiceFactory;
@@ -256,8 +256,35 @@ private static Element createBundlesElement(Context context, Item item, AtomicBo
     }
 
     /**
-     * Sanitizes a string to remove characters that are invalid
-     * in XML 1.0 using the Apache Commons Text library.
+     * Matches everything XML 1.0 forbids outright, in three alternations:
+     * <ol>
+     *   <li>C0 controls other than tab, LF and CR, plus the non-characters U+FFFE and U+FFFF;</li>
+     *   <li>a high surrogate not followed by a low surrogate;</li>
+     *   <li>a low surrogate not preceded by a high surrogate.</li>
+     * </ol>
+     * See https://www.w3.org/TR/xml/#charsets. Unpaired surrogates matter in practice: a truncated
+     * 4-byte character in ingested metadata makes the StAX writer throw "Broken surrogate pair", and
+     * because XOAI.index() catches that per item the record is silently dropped from the OAI index.
+     */
+    private static final Pattern INVALID_XML10_CHARS = Pattern.compile(
+        "[\\x00-\\x08\\x0B\\x0C\\x0E-\\x1F\\uFFFE\\uFFFF]"
+            + "|[\\uD800-\\uDBFF](?![\\uDC00-\\uDFFF])"
+            + "|(?<![\\uD800-\\uDBFF])[\\uDC00-\\uDFFF]");
+
+    /**
+     * Sanitizes a string to remove characters that are invalid in XML 1.0.
+     * <P>
+     * NOTE: this deliberately REMOVES illegal characters rather than escaping the string. The value
+     * returned here is handed to the XOAI serializer, which performs XML escaping itself (every text
+     * event goes through {@code XMLStreamWriter.writeCharacters}), so escaping here as well would
+     * double-escape every value containing &amp;, &lt;, &gt;, " or ' — a harvester would then read the
+     * literal text "&amp;lt;" instead of a "&lt;" character. That silently corrupts every OAI format
+     * built on the xoai document, including the cmdi and olac formats CLARIN/LINDAT is aggregated
+     * through.
+     * <P>
+     * The removal set must stay equivalent to what {@code StringEscapeUtils.escapeXml10} removed —
+     * notably including unpaired surrogates — otherwise items carrying them fail to serialize and
+     * drop out of the OAI index entirely.
      * @param value The string to sanitize.
      * @return A sanitized string, or null if the input was null.
      */
@@ -265,7 +292,7 @@ private static String sanitize(String value) {
         if (value == null) {
             return null;
         }
-        return StringEscapeUtils.escapeXml10(value);
+        return INVALID_XML10_CHARS.matcher(value).replaceAll("");
     }
 
     /**