update_option method with support of utf8

I am using a plugin the updates the option table using update_option command.
When I update content with hebrew characters it turns into gibrish.
My database does support hebrew (or any other utf8 chars).
Is there any workaround?

Thank you!

Chances is are that the content-type/charset header is not being sent, and that you end up reading the utf8 chars as if they were latin-1.

Also, note that serialize()/unserialize() are not multibyte character-safe. For a subset of characters, the string’s length as returned by serialize() will occasionally differ from the expected length as it would be returned by mb_strlen(). This leads to all sorts of hard to debug unserialize problems which, since around WP 2.8, WP tries to discard in order to avoid crashing sites.