TEL AVIV: An elderly Israeli hostage who was released by Hamas overnight said she had been treated quite well during her two-week captivity in the Palestinian enclave.
Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, was one of two women freed late on Monday, leaving around 220 hostages still in the hands of Hamas.
“I’ve been through hell, we didn’t think or know we would get to this situation,” she told reporters, seated in a wheelchair outside the Tel Aviv hospital where she was taken following her release.
Looking frail, Lifshitz said she had been put on a motorbike and driven from her kibbutz into nearby Gaza.
Lifshitz, an Israeli grandmother who was held hostage in Gaza, speaks to members of the press after being released by Hamas militants, at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv, Israel
Once in Gaza, she said her captors took her into tunnels that she compared to a spider’s web, and treated her well.
Lifshitz said a doctor had visited her and made sure she and other hostages received the same sort of medicines they had been taking in Israel.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian health ministry said more than 5,000 people have been killed in Gaza by two weeks of Israeli air strikes unleashed in response to a devastating Hamas attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7. The Islamist militant group killed more than 1,400 people – mostly civilians – in a single day.
