“I went through hell,” Yocheved Lifshitz, freed by Hamas militants, said at a press conference in a Tel Aviv hospital.
The woman spoke Hebrew, and her daughter Sharon translated her words into English. A former prisoner says, writes Air Force, that she was captured by Hamas fighters on motorcycles, and at one point she was beaten with sticks and forced to walk. But in the tunnels where she ended up, the attitude towards the prisoners was completely different:
“They treated us kindly and provided us with everything we needed. We ate the same food as them – bread with cheese, processed cheese, cucumbers. This was food for the whole day. They treated us well.”
This is how she answered the journalists’ question why, after her release, she extended her hand to the militant for a handshake. The woman said that every two or three days a doctor came to her and the other hostages and gave them medicine.
“They seemed to be ready for this, they had taken a long time to prepare, they had everything they needed for men and women, including shampoo.”
According to Lifshits, everyone slept on mattresses. She compared the “vast network” of underground tunnels run by Hamas to a “spider web.” The woman criticized the Israeli military for not taking the threat from Hamas seriously enough in the lead-up to the attack.
So far, the militants have freed four people – 79-year-old Nurit Cooper, 85-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz and two US citizen hostages Yehudit (in some sources Judith) Raanan and her daughter Natalie. According to Israeli data as of Monday morning, Hamas is holding 222 people in Gaza.
Yocheved Lifshitz’s daughter visited her mother in hospital in Israel and told the BBC that her mother “seems to be fine”:
“Seeing my mother again is incredible. Holding her hand, just kissing her, and I’m so proud of her, she’s amazing. The way she left and then came back and said thank you seemed absolutely incredible to me. This looks so much like her. There [в заложниках у ХАМАС] There are still more than 200 people, and we must not focus only on our personal happiness, but work towards the liberation of everyone.”
The family still has no news of her father, who was also taken hostage. The daughter says: “He was not kept with his mother, so she does not know where he is.”
According to Sharon, her father was active in protecting Palestinian rights and “working to achieve peace with our neighbors.” He was convinced that “we must find a way to live together […] and fought very stubbornly against the idea of occupation, the idea of eternal war. He speaks Arabic well so he can communicate well with people there. He knows many people in Gaza. I want to believe that he will be okay.”
As Jeremy Bowena, BBC international editor (Jerusalem), noted, it is clear that Qatar has been acting as a mediator in negotiations with Hamas for the release of Israeli hostages for some time. Gratitude to the Qatari authorities for this was officially expressed in Washington.
It probably works something like this. Many leaders of the political wing of Hamas spend most of their time living and working in Qatar. Thus, the Qatari authorities have the opportunity to negotiate with them directly, and through them the Qataris probably have access to the leaders of the military wing of the group.
It should be clarified that Hamas is not an organization familiar to us, with any clear structure and hierarchy: its military and political “divisions” can be represented by completely different leaders of the group, who are not always even in contact with each other. According to one version, the political wing of Hamas might not even know about the large-scale attack on the Israelis being prepared on October 7.
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