Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, is a Girl Who Goes Through Hell: Her Story of a Palestinian Hostage
The 85-year- old woman, Yocheved Lifshitz, was released after 17 days after she was taken away on a motorcycle.
Hamas has released four hostages, including Judith and Natalie Raanan, American-Israeli citizens who were freed last week. Ms. Lifshitz is the first person to speak about her experience as a hostage.
She sat in a wheelchair at a hospital in Tel Aviv after her release, telling reporters she had gone through hell.
She was freed along with another woman on Monday, and transferred from Hamas custody to Israeli forces through the International Committee for the Red Cross and Egypt. Two of their husbands are being held hostage.
Her account of the tunnels gave a glimpse of the difficulties faced by Israel as it ponders whether to go ahead with a ground invasion of Gaza to destroy Hamas.
Military analysts said that Hamas has built a labyrinth of underground passages for its fighters in the Gaza Strip, making it difficult for Israel to rescue hostages and for it to launch a ground operation.
The Gazan airstrike killed 500 people, and Israel did not spare a single victim, Ms. Lifshitz said
“Many people stormed our homes, they beat people, some of them they abducted, like me,” Ms. Lifshitz said. “It made no difference, they abducted the elderly and the young.”
She said her kidnappers hauled her onto a motorcycle and beat her painfully in the ribs, making it hard for her to breathe, and also took away her watch. They drove off through the fields surrounding Nir Oz.
About 25 people were in a large hall after they took her through the network of tunnels. After about two to three hours, they separated five people from her kibbutz into their own room, where they were overseen by guards and a medic, she said.
Ms. Lifshitz said that she and others were relatively well taken care of, given medicine and the same food as their captors. Fearing disease, her captors worked to sanitize the area, she said, and doctors would visit sporadically to check on them. “They treated us gently and fulfilled all of our needs,” she said.
The Gazan health ministry claims that 500 people died at a hospital in Gaza after an Israeli airstrike, but there are conflicting stories about what actually happened. The story sparked protests in the Middle East.
Ms. Lifshitz at times criticized the Israeli military, saying that it and the Shin Bet domestic security service had ignored warning signs of the threat to towns near Gaza. The Israeli military’s chief of staff acknowledged after the attack that the military had failed to live up to its mission to protect Israel’s citizens.
Weeks before the assault, Palestinians had rioted and fired explosive balloons near the Gaza border fence, sparking fires in southern Israel, Ms. Lifshitz said.
The Hamas of Gaza: A Palestinian journalist’s death in the New York Times and Jerusalem condemns Israel’s alleged Israeli atrocity
As a journalist, Said got a lot of his money from working with foreign reporters as a “fixer”, someone who could arrange difficult meetings, translate from Arabic, and show you around. Said had an independent streak and he was no fan of Yasir Arafat, which made him particularly helpful in cutting through the Palestinian Authority’s propagandistic bombast.
The parking lot behind the hospital was hit by a missile, but it did not hit the hospital. It was confirmed by U.S. intelligence that the explosion was caused by a missile that malfunctioned and fell to earth, intended to kill Israelis. There is no solid reason to believe the death toll reached anywhere near 500. The Gaza health ministry is an entity owned by the terrorist group Hamas, which is towing and promoting whatever they want.
The Palestinian territories, by contrast, are republics of fear — fear of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and of Hamas in Gaza. Palestinians are not more honest than people in other countries. The risk of straying from the approved line is the same as in a tyrant or fanatical regime.
Or take the case of Hani al-Agha, a Palestinian journalist who was jailed for weeks and tortured by Hamas in 2019. The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate condemned the arrest and torture of al-Agha as an attempt to intimidate journalists in Gaza, who are subject to repressive police authority. The story was covered by a few news releases, but the rest of the media didn’t give it much attention.
The New York Times has documented the horror and human cost of the conflict over the past two weeks. The photographs are hard to look at, but The Times publishes them to convey to readers the gravity of the devastation in the region.
Readers are entitled to know where the information came from and who supplied it in a story about the alleged Israeli atrocity in Gaza. It’s not good that Hamas oppresses Palestinians and intimidates Israelis. We don’t need it misinforming the rest of us.
The bodies are in black bags and lying on the ground. A woman is holding the body of her grandson. People are at a funeral for a loved one. A man is wounded after an airstrike.
The Times pictures come out of Israel and Gaza, where Ms. Tripoli is based. The team takes into account not only newsworthiness of the photograph and the dignity of those pictured when deciding whether or not to publish it.
If the editors decide that a photograph should be published, they then discuss its placement in an article. Does the photo appear next to the headline, where it will immediately confront the reader? Or should it be placed a few paragraphs down in the text, so as not to disturb someone who isn’t expecting it? Should it be used with posts on social media?
A Tale of Two Hamadanites: How Zarifeh and his Crew traverse Gaza to Rebuild a Nation’s First Republic
Zarifeh has been living in Gaza for 55 years and has covered thirty conflicts for White Media.
That first morning, his team set about rebuilding. The key requirement was power: Israel had begun to cut off Gaza’s electricity. So they got creative, harnessing solar energy, hunting down generators, and sourcing extra large portable batteries for on-the-go charging. Now, his journalists will often travel by foot across the 25-mile-long Gaza Strip in order to save fuel for their generators.