Daughter of freed Israeli hostage says she is ‘so proud’ of her 85 year-old mum

The daughter of elderly Israeli hostage Yocheved Lifschitz, one of the two hostages freed on Monday night, has said she is “so proud” of her 85 year-old mother after being reunited with her at a hospital.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme Sharone Lifschitz said:”To see my mum again is an incredible thing. To hold her hand, just to kiss her face, and her cheek, and I’m so proud of her, she’s amazing.

“The nurses are just having a chat, they say she is very sharp and is very keen to share the information, pass on the information to families of other hostages that she was with.”

She told presenter Mishal Husain: “I’m a bit speechless. “I sat next to her for like an hour and then we came out and my brother is with her. Everybody is so tired. She’s been through a lot.”

Hamas released footage of the release of the two hostages on Monday that showed Lifschitz briefly holding the hand of one of the hostage-takers. 

Lifshitz and Nurit Cooper, 79, were handed over to the Red Cross at the Rafah crossing on Monday evening.

“The way she walked off and then came back and then said thank you was quite incredible to me,” her daughter told the BBC.  “It’s so her.”

She added: “There are still over 200 people there and we must not kind of get caught only in our personal happiness but work towards the release of everybody.”

But there is no plan to tell her mother the full extent of Hamas’s attack on their home village, Kibbutz Nir Oz, one of the communities worst hit on 7 October.

“I’m not there yet,” her daughter said. “I can come to you in a while to tell you what we’re doing. We don’t have a plan, I guess no family has a plan for what would happen if something like that happened, it’s so off the scale.

“We are just living one day at a time.”

Lifschitz said her family still has no news of her father, who was also taken captive.”He was not with my mum, so my mum doesn’t know where he is,” she said in the BBC interview.

“My father was getting more frail. Both of them are very loving people, family people. They really loved hosting the family and my father was very involved in political things in the kibbutz.

“He was very involved in rights for Palestinians and working towards peace with our neighbours.”

Lifschitz revealed her father was dedicated to the belief that “we have to find a way to live together, he felt that it was very easy to find a way and was very disappointed and fought very hard against this idea of occupation, the idea of perpetual war”.

“And I hope that he’s there and he’s being looked after and he’s got the chance to talk. 

“He speaks good Arabic so can communicate very well with the people there. He knows many people in Gaza. I want to think he’s going to be OK.”