LAST UPDATE | 24 Oct 2023
VIDEO FOOTAGE HAS been released of the moment two elderly women who had been held as hostages by Hamas militants were handed over to the Red Cross.
85-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz was released last night alongside fellow Israeli citizen Nurit Cooper, who is 79-years-old.
However, their husbands, 83 and 84, remain captive with more than 200 other civilians.
Video footage of the moment Lifshitz was handed over to the Red Cross shows her shaking the hand of one of her captors while saying “Shalom”, a Hebrew word meaning “peace” that is also used to express “hello” or “goodbye”.
Her daughter has said that she and her mother are hoping for peace between the two sides.
Yocheved Lifshitz is “very sharp and is very keen” to share information, her daughter has said, as efforts continue to free the other captives and supply aid to Palestinians.
Sharone Lifschitz, who is based in London, said her 85-year-old mother, Yocheved Lifshitz, “seems OK” after being freed from her weeks-long ordeal in Gaza.
Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, has told how she was kept in a “spider web” of tunnels underneath Gaza by Hamas militants during her captivity.
Translating for her mother, Sharone Lifschitz told a press conference in Tel Aviv: “She was taken on the back of a motorbike, with her legs on one side and her head on the other side.
“That she was taken through the ploughed fields with the men in front, on one side, and a man behind her. And while she was being taken she was hit by sticks.
“Until they reached the tunnels. There they walked for a few kilometres on the wet ground.
“There is a huge network of tunnels underneath – it looks like a spider web.”
Britain said six of its nationals are among those still being held hostage since Hamas launched its bloody raids on Israel on 7 October.
Lifschitz, an artist and academic who spells her name differently from her mother, said it was “incredible” to be reunited with her – “to hold her hand and to kiss her cheek”.
“She is very sharp and is very keen to share the information, pass on the information to families of other hostages she was with,” she told the BBC.
She said she will continue to campaign for the release of her father, Oded Lifschitz, and the other captives.
“I hope he is being looked after and has the chance to talk,” Sharone Lifschitz said.
“He speaks good Arabic, so he can communicate very well with the people there.
“He knows many people in Gaza and the West Bank. I want to think that he’s going to be OK.
“My mum said they had been looked after and there was a doctor there, so this gives a lot of comfort to everybody.
“We have so many people that we’ve lost – it is a little ray of light but there is a huge darkness as well.”
Lifschitz said she and her mother still dream of peace with the Palestinians, even as an expected ground invasion of Gaza by Israel threatens sparking a wider war in the region.
“We have to find ways because there is no alternative. If anything, it makes me even more resolved,” she said.
“The way has got longer – we are dealing with grief and loss on a level we can never get over, but as nations we will have to find a way forward.”
The release of the two women took the total number of people freed to four, with an American woman and her teenage daughter having been released three days earlier.
The UK’s Foreign Office welcomed the release of the hostages.
“Our thoughts remain with the families of loved ones still being held captive, as they endure unimaginable anguish and worry at this time,” a spokeswoman said.
“We will continue to work tirelessly with Qatar, Israel and others to ensure all hostages come home safely.”
Doha is a key mediator in the Middle East conflict, with a number of figures in Hamas’s political wing said to live in Qatar.
Lifshitz and Cooper were handed over to the Red Cross at the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt.
Hamas said it had released the two women for humanitarian reasons.
Along with their husbands, they were snatched from their homes in the kibbutz of Nir Oz near the Gaza border during Hamas’s rampage into southern Israeli communities.
More than 1,400 people in Israel, mostly civilians, were killed during the initial Hamas attack.
According to the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza, more than 5,000 Palestinians, including around 2,000 minors and 1,100 women, have been killed since.
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