JERUSALEM—Eighty-five-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz recalled a "hell that we never knew before and never thought we would experience" as she described the traumatic Oct. 7 attack on her kibbutz by Hamas terrorists and the dread of being dragged prisoner into Gaza.
Ms. Lifshitz was the first of the four hostages released so far to speak about their ordeal, from the first attack to the more than two weeks they were held captive.
“Masses swarmed our houses, beat people, and some were taken hostage,” said Ms. Lifshitz, speaking softly from a wheelchair as she briefed reporters on Tuesday at Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital, a day after Hamas released her and 79-year-old Nurit Cooper. “They didn’t care if they were young or old.”
Oded, her 83-year-old husband, is still a captive in Gaza.
Ms. Lifshitz, a member of Kibbutz Nir Oz, was one of more than 200 Israelis and foreigners apprehended after heavily armed Hamas terrorists breached Israel's multibillion-dollar electric border fence and swept across southern Israel, destroying nearly two dozen communities, military bases, and a desert rave. The daylong murderous spree that ensued claimed the lives of almost 1,400 individuals.
According to the Hamas-led Gaza Health Ministry, Israel's military has begun a war on Gaza in an effort to defeat Hamas, and its airstrikes into Gaza have killed over 5,000 Palestinians. Ms. Lifshitz's kidnappers rushed her onto a motorbike, took her watch and jewels, and assaulted her with sticks, injuring her ribs and making breathing difficult, she claimed.
She traveled several kilometers into Gaza to a network of tunnels that she described as "looking like a spider web." She arrived in a huge chamber where 25 people had been brought, but was subsequently divided into a smaller group with four others.
The people assigned to guard her “told us they are people who believe in the Quran and wouldn’t hurt us.”
According to Ms. Lifshitz, prisoners were well-treated and got medical attention, including medicines. She said that the guards maintained the environment clean. She claimed that hostages were fed one meal a day of cheese, cucumber, and pita, and that her captors ate the same.
Ms. Lifshitz and her husband were peace campaigners who drove Palestinian patients from Gaza to Israeli hospitals for treatment. "We don't want to talk about politics," the captives informed their captors in captivity, she claimed.
The second set of hostages to be released were Ms. Lifshitz and Ms. Cooper. Hamas released two Israeli-American women on Friday. The Israeli government has stated that the safe return of all captives is a high priority.
Ms. Lifshitz claimed Israel ignored signs that something was up before the strike.
“We were the scapegoat of the government,” she said. “They [Hamas] warned us three weeks before they taught us a lesson. A huge crowd arrived at the road. They burned fields. They sent incendiary balloons to burn the fields, and the army didn’t take it seriously.”
