Released Israeli hostage Yocheved Lifshitz speaks to press at the Ichilov hospital in Tel Aviv, October 24, 2023. (Photo: Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)
Nurit Cooper (79) and Yocheved Lifshitz (85) were released by Hamas on Monday night, after terrorists had captured and taken them to the Gaza Strip during the Oct. 7 assault that ignited the war between Israel and the Hamas terror organization.
Only Lifshitz chose to speak to the media on the morning after her release, and her recollection of the harrowing events shed some additional light on Hamas terror tactics during the assault and the planning that went into the surprise attack.
Lifshitz recalled that she was seized by the terrorists in her home in Kibbutz Nir Oz and thrown over a motorcycle, before being driven to a tunnel entrance inside the Gaza Strip. On the way, the terrorists occasionally beat her on her midsection and stole her jewelry.
She was then made to walk through damp tunnels for somewhere between two and three hours, where she was kept with another 25 hostages for a while.
They were then separated into groups of five and put in separate cells, where each group remained under watch by terrorists and supervision by a medic.
“We lay there on mattresses. They took special care about the sanitary side of things, to ensure we did not, God forbid, end up falling ill in their hands,” Lifshitz said.
The hostages ate together with the terrorists and occasionally spoke with them. Every couple of days, a doctor came to provide some of the prescription medications that the hostages required.
As Lifshitz said herself, “They seemed prepared for this. They prepared for this for a long time.”
Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the U.S. think tank, Foundation for the Freedom of Democracies, said that Lifshitz’s account shows that theories about Hamas “somehow stumbling upon a bonanza of mass-murder and abductions,” were clearly wrong.
“Just as the Palestinian terrorist group has clearly spent years – and untold sums of stolen aid money and Iranian terrorist funding – digging a veritable city of bunkers below ground, taking hostages in large numbers was clearly part of its strategic plan,” Dubowitz said.
More and more evidence of this continues to be released by the Israeli government.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog had already told CNN on Oct. 16 that some of the dead terrorists were found to have carried “abduction manuals” with detailed instructions to kidnap, torture and kill Israeli citizens.
On Monday, Israel released more footage from interrogations of captured Hamas terrorists who took part in the massacre of Israeli citizens and told the interrogators that they received explicit instructions to commit atrocities.
“In Gaza, those who bring hostages get a grant – an apartment and $10,000,” one terrorist admitted.
Another shared the orders he was given to kill young men and to “kidnap the elderly, women and children.”
The testimonies by Lifshitz and the terrorists themselves, as well as the instruction manuals that were found, clearly disprove statements that members of the Hamas Qassam Brigades had been instructed not to harm or capture civilians, as senior Hamas official Khalil al-Hayya told the New York Times in a recent interview
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