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An elderly Israeli peace advocate who was freed from Hamas captivity late last month said she met the terror group’s leader during her ordeal — and asked him “how he wasn’t ashamed.”
Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, said Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar visited the hostages in the first days of their captivity in Gaza.
“Sinwar was with us three [or] four days after we got there,” Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, told the Davar newspaper at a Tuesday evening rally outside the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv, the Times of Israel reported.
“I asked him how he wasn’t ashamed, to do such a thing to people who for years support peace? He didn’t answer. He was quiet,” she claimed.
Lifshitz and her husband, 83-year-old Oded, were abducted from their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz — which they helped to found in the 1950s — during Hamas’ grisly Oct. 7 surprise attack on southern Israel.
Lifshitz and her neighbor, 79-year-old Nurit Cooper, were released on Oct. 23.
Oded, however, is believed to still be a hostage in the Gaza Strip.
When she first returned to Israel after nearly one month in captivity, Lifshitz told the news outlet that she had been “through hell.”
“They hit people,” she said at the press conference about the terrorists’ merciless incursion on Kibbutz NIr Oz and other border communities.
“They did not care about kidnapping [the] elderly and children. It was extremely painful,” she added.
While she is still recovering from the abduction, Lifshitz — a longtime peace advocate who helped Palestinians receive medical care in Israel in the past — was resolute at the Tuesday evening rally.
“They did not care about kidnapping [the] elderly and children. It was extremely painful,” she added.
“I’m here to protest. To bring my Oded home. We will keep protesting until all of the hostages are back,” she told Davar.
Sinwar, 61, remains Israel’s most wanted man nearly two months after the Oct. 7 massacre.
Lifshitz’s recollection of her face time with the leader whom Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dubbed a “dead man walking” follows similar reports that Sinwar met with other abductees from Nir Oz in the days after the attack, the Guardian added.
“Hello, I am Yahya Sinwar. You are the most protected here. Nothing will happen to you,” Sinwar allegedly told the victims, according to a relative of a recently released hostage who spoke with Israel’s Channel 12 news.
Sinwar learned Hebrew while serving 22 years in prison for the 1989 abduction and murder of two Israeli soldiers and four Palestinians, the Guardian reported.
He was released in 2011 as part of a controversial exchange deal to free kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, and was designated as a terrorist by the US in 2015.
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