On Oct. 7, Hamas gunmen entered the home of 85-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz, shot her husband Oded in the hand, then threw her onto a motorcycle and dragged her toward the Gaza tunnels, her son said. -Son after his release.
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In the “very damp” and “very deep” labyrinth of rooms and underground passages in the area controlled by the Palestinian Islamist movement, the old lady said she met a high-ranking Hamas official.
She initially mistakes him for a man few Israelis have ever seen in person: Yahya Sinouar, leader of Hamas in Gaza, one of the suspected masterminds of the October 7 attack.
AFP
“She said she saw him and said, ‘Aren’t you ashamed? How can you not be ashamed to do such things to people who have fought for peace all their lives?’” describes his grandson Daniel Lifshitz in an interview with AFPTV.
“She said he was silent.”
But after questioning the old lady, the security services were convinced that it was not Yahya Sinouar, her son told Israeli television Channel 13.
“My mother said she had met Sinouar, but security officers questioned her, showed her photos and it turned out that she had not met him,” said Yocheved Lifshitz.
Ismaïl Haniyeh (left) sits next to Yahya Sinouar, who holds the child of a slain Hamas fighter on his lap, in Gaza, March 27, 2017. AFP/Mahmud Hams
“She doesn’t really know who he was, but he introduced himself as an executive,” he said. “She thought she was talking to Yahya Sinouar and she told us that when she came back (from captivity), but after checking it turned out it wasn’t him.”
When contacted by AFP, Hamas declined to confirm that such a meeting had taken place.
“Last Vision”
The Lifshitz family described her husband, Oded, as a passionate human rights defender who regularly picked up sick Palestinians from Gaza and took them to hospitals in Israel.
Yahya Sinouar, 61, is known for both his discretion and his commitment to armed struggle and has not appeared in public since October.
AFP
The man described by the Israeli army as “death on borrowed time” spent 23 years in Israeli prisons where he learned Hebrew. In 2011, he was exchanged with a thousand Palestinian prisoners for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was held hostage by Hamas for five years and then took over the leadership of the movement in Gaza in 2017.
Yocheved Lifshitz was released in late October along with another elderly woman, but her husband Oded, 83, remains in captivity. According to Hamas, the two women were released on humanitarian grounds.
According to Daniel Lifshitz, his grandmother “fell ill with a stomach infection, she lost almost ten kilos.” She would have died if she had stayed there.
AFP
After the end of the ceasefire on Friday morning and the exchange of a total of dozens of hostages for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel since November 24, the fate of the hostages who remain in the hands of Hamas or other armed groups in Gaza is uncertain.
According to Daniel, the old lady hasn’t seen her husband since the day she was kidnapped.
“The last vision my grandmother had of him was when she was on the motorcycle. This is the picture [qui lui reste]after 63 years of marriage.