According to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, the released hostages are 85-year-old Jocheved Lifschitz and 79-year-old Nurit Cooper. The two Israeli women come from Kibbutz Nir Os and were taken hostage along with their 80-year-old husbands during the major Hamas attack on October 7th.
According to Netanyahu’s office, the two husbands remain held in the Gaza Strip along with more than 200 other hostages. On Friday, Hamas released two hostages for the first time, two US citizens.
The two women were taken by military helicopter to the Sourasky Clinic in Tel Aviv that night – one of them on a stretcher, the other in a wheelchair, as a journalist from the AFP news agency observed. According to the government, they were met there by their families.
“I don’t know where I was taken,” Jocheved Lifschitz said, according to the Israeli news website Ynet. She had to get on a motorcycle, “one terrorist held me from the front, the other from behind,” said Lifschitz, describing the hostage-taking. They crossed the border with the Gaza Strip and she was initially held in the town of Abasan near Beeri. “Then I don’t know where I was taken.”
The spokesman for Hamas’ armed wing, Abu Obeida, had previously said that the two women had been released “for compelling humanitarian reasons.”
For its part, the International Committee of the Red Cross said on the online service X (formerly Twitter) that it had helped free the two hostages by “bringing them out of Gaza this evening.” According to Israeli media, they were brought into Egypt through the Rafah border crossing.
The Essedin al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ armed wing, posted a video on Telegram. It shows the two women accompanied by masked and armed members of the brigades as they are handed over to Red Cross employees.
Images from Egyptian television channels showed the women being taken into ambulances after their arrival in Egypt.
Netanyahu’s office said the Israeli government, the army and all security services would continue to do everything “to find all hostages and bring all kidnapped people home.”
During their attack on Israeli territory, the heavily armed Islamists kidnapped more than 200 people as hostages in the Gaza Strip – including babies, children, pregnant women, soldiers and foreigners. German citizens are also among them.
According to Israeli government figures, around 1,400 people were killed in the Hamas attack. In response to the major attack, Israel sealed off the Gaza Strip and launched massive air strikes. More than 5,000 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip since the Israeli attacks began, according to Hamas figures that could not be independently verified by AFP.
The US, meanwhile, rejected calls for a humanitarian ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. US President Joe Biden called for the release of all hostages before talks on a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas could take place. “The hostages must be released, only then can we talk,” Biden said on Monday evening in the White House.
A ceasefire would give Hamas “the ability to rest, re-equip and prepare new terrorist attacks against Israel,” said US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for a temporary end to the fighting between Israel and Hamas on the sidelines of the Middle East summit in Cairo at the weekend. The European Union is divided on the issue.
