It was an extraordinary moment when an 85-year-old hostage shook the hand of her Hamas captor and said one word: “Shalom”.
Yocheved Lifshitz, who was released by Hamas after 16 days in captivity, is now focused on trying to secure the release of other hostages. And her daughter, Sharone Lifschitz, has revealed that the captor was reportedly a paramedic with whom her mother had discussed peace.
Sharone said her mother had been comforting the relatives of other captives while she received medical treatment in Tel Aviv.
She said she was “immensely proud” of Yocheved, a retired teacher who has emerged from her ordeal several kilos lighter but with a determination to bring some hope to the families of the remaining hostages.
Sharone, a London-based artist and academic, said: “It’s really hard to explain that we are still in this. As my mum says, her body is here but her heart is back there with the rest of the hostages.”
Yocheved and her husband, Oded, 83, who have been married for 63 years and are peace and human rights activists, were kidnapped by Hamas gunmen from the Nir Oz kibbutz in southern Israel on 7 October.
Yocheved had told her daughter that she became separated from Oded after witnessing him being shot in the hand. Yocheved was tied to a motorcycle and driven to Gaza, while Oded, a veteran journalist, remains missing.
Sharone, who has travelled to Israel, described her mother as a “tough cookie” and said it was impossible to comprehend the trauma she has experienced.
“My mum is doing really well, she is improving every day. She’s very focused on returning the rest of the hostages and that’s really her number one priority,” she told the Guardian.
“She’s been talking on the phone today, she’s been identifying some photos [of hostages], some people she knew before and some not. She’s talking on the phone to the families and trying to reassure them that at least the group of people she was with, after the atrocities and horrendous things they went through, had medical attention and a little bit of food and they’re not being tortured.”
Yocheved told a press conference on Tuesday that she had been bundled on to a motorbike, beaten with sticks and forced to walk kilometres through a spider web of dark underground tunnels to an unknown location where she was held captive with 25 other people, including children.
She was released on Monday night with Nurit Yitzhak, 79, who also goes by the name Nurit Cooper, in a deal brokered by Egypt and Qatar. As the two women were handed to aid workers, Yocheved turned to a masked Hamas militant who was holding an assault rifle, offered her hand and said “shalom”.
Sharone said her mother told her that the man was a paramedic who had tended to her in her captivity and with whom she had discussed peace in a mixture of broken English and Hebrew. “This was a paramedic and they had a chat about finding a better place for the world and for the region,” she said.
Sharone was keen to stress that her mother’s comments about her Hamas captors showing “care” and “gentleness” after initial brutality should not detract from the hostages’ ordeal.
“My mum’s whole life has been turned upside down in the most horrendous way,” she said. “My mother always believed in humanity. You have to understand there are different units within Hamas, and the people that kidnapped her are not the people that looked after her. The massacre and slaughter and horrific crimes committed against humanity in those kibbutzes cannot be washed out by anything.”
She said it seemed as if her mother had “emerged from the dead” when they were reunited. The family are now continuing to focus their attention on campaigning for the release of the other hostages, including Oded.
Sharone said: “We’re extremely happy to have my mother back. We’re extremely worried about my father. He has spent his life wanting to build peace, and it’s incredibly painful for my mum to see this becoming his legacy.
“We are doing everything we can to help everybody to bring back the rest of the people. These people are still in the dark tunnels. They must come home, they are not part of this fight. There are babies, children, young people, elderly people and people that were injured and we have to bring them back.”
Despite the horrors they suffered, Yocheved told her daughter that she had witnessed hostages taking care of each other. “My mother’s seen people behaving in the most amazing way, people looking after the children, people trying to provide for each other in this impossible situation,” Sharone said. “There are no textbooks that explain how to deal with this trauma. It is off the scale.”
