Yesterday Hamas released two more hostages taken on October 7. One of those hostages was an 85-year-old woman named Yocheved Lifshitz who lived in a Kibbutz near the Gaza security fence. She is a grandmother who has spent years of her life helping Palestinians in Gaza get medical care.
Lifshitz and her 83-year old husband, Oded, were kidnapped from their home at the Nir Oz kibbutz, close to the border with Gaza in southern Israel, the Israeli prime minister’s office said late on Monday. Oded remained captive, it added.
“They are human rights activists, peace activists for all their life,” grandson Daniel Lifshitz told Reuters in Tel Aviv before the release was confirmed.
“For more than a decade, they took … sick Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, not from the West Bank, from the Gaza Strip every week from the Erez border to the hospitals in Israel to get treatment for their disease, for cancer, for anything,” he added.
After her release from a hospital, Lifshitz had a lot to say about what she experienced starting with the kidnapping itself.
“I went through hell,” Ms. Lifshitz told reporters the day after her release, sitting in a wheelchair at a hospital in Tel Aviv amid a thicket of microphones…
Ms. Lifshitz’s voice at times faltered as she recalled her abduction and the horrors suffered by her neighbors when Hamas attacked her town of Kibbutz Nir Oz. Her daughter Sharone, who was crouched at her side on Tuesday, occasionally translated for foreign journalists.
“Many people stormed our homes, they beat people, some of them they abducted, like me,” Ms. Lifshitz said. “It made no difference, they abducted the elderly and the young.”
“In my memory, I have these images all the time,” she added later.
She was then thrown on a motorbike and transported back to Gaza:
“I was kidnapped on a motorbike on my side while they were driving toward Gaza,” Lifshitz said. Her daughter explained how her head lay on one side of the motorbike while her feet dangled from the other.
“It was a painful act. They brought us into a gate. I was lying on the side on the motorbike. I got bruises because of the drive,” Lifshitz added.
From there she was taken into the tunnels:
After being slung over the back of a motorbike and hit with sticks, Lifshitz told reporters in Tel Aviv on Tuesday that she was taken underground.
“They walked for a few kilometers on the wet ground,” Lifshitz’s daughter, acting as a translator, explained. “There is a huge, huge network of tunnels underneath. It looks like a spiderweb.”…
“As we got there, the people told us that they are people who believe in the Quran and they will not harm us, and we will get the same conditions they get in the tunnels,” Lifshitz said.
Those conditions consisted of a mattress in the damp tunnels and one meal a day of cheese and cucumbers. Lifshitz said there were other hostages there including some children. Like a lot of Israelis, she is also angry at the government’s absolute failure to protect her and her neighbors from a horde of Hamas militants.
“The lack of awareness by Shin Bet (the Israel Security Agency) and the IDF hurt us a lot,” she said. “They warned us three weeks beforehand, they burned fields, they sent fire balloons and the IDF did not treat it seriously,” she added, referring to Hamas.
It’s obviously cruel to treat an 85-year-old woman this way but I guess the good news is that the Hamas hostage takers were not as intentionally cruel to their kidnapped victims as they were to all of the families they murdered while collecting these hostages. Lifshitz said her captors treated her with kindness and even had a doctor checking on the hostages. At the moment she was released she shook hands with one of her captors and said, “Shalom.” She was asked about that at the press conference.
When asked what she meant by the gesture of shaking a Hamas gunman's hand, freed hostage Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, says 'because they treated us very nicely'.
"They seemed really prepared and had concealed it for a long time," she added.
📺 Sky 501 pic.twitter.com/8F4d4wnuED
— Sky News (@SkyNews) October 24, 2023
Still this is all part of Hamas plan to keep the hostages docile so they can be used as human shields. If they weren’t useful in this way Hamas would murder them the way they did the other 1,400 Israelis they killed. One of those hostages who is still in danger in the Gaza tunnels is Lifshitz’ husband.
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