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Along with the bodies of two members of the Bibas family, including the youngest hostage Kfir, who was nine months old when kidnapped and taken to Gaza, and an unidentified woman in the place of Kfir’s mother Shiri Bibas, Hamas released a fourth body at the same time. This was the body of one of the oldest hostages, 83-year-old Oded Lifshitz. Lifshitz was a gentle and kind soul, by all accounts, a lifelong peace activist who continued to believe in the possibility of Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation. He spent much time helping Palestinians from Gaza to receive treatment in hospitals in Israel. None of that peace activism or help he gave to Palestinians, of course, would have mattered to the Hamas goons who murdered him. More on the life of Oded Lifshitz can be found here: “Super grandpa and lifelong peace advocate: Family mourns slain hostage Oded Lifshitz,” Jerusalem Post, February 20, 2025:
…Lifshitz, an 83-year-old who helped found Kibbutz Nir Oz, was a lifelong peacenik and Palestinian rights advocate; Lifshitz worked for years for daily paper Al HaMishmar before his retirement….
In his work as a journalist, Lifshitz reported extensively on the Bedouin sector in Israel and reportedly took a case to the High Court, which resulted in the return of some of their land, AP reported.
He was part of an organization called Road to Recovery that helped Palestinians cross the Erez border in order to receive treatments in Israeli hospitals. “They have been human rights activists, peace activists for all their lives,” his grandson told Reuters.
Because of his experience in activism and his connections to the Arab world, his daughter said that he was more than aware of how destructive jihadist forces were.
Lifshitz had an unclouded vision of what could happen if Israeli-Palestinian divisions festered to a point beyond return.
“When the Palestinians have nothing to lose, we will lose, big time,” Lifshitz wrote some years ago in Haaretz. “The question is, what do we do then?”
Lifshitz was a political naif, who did not realize the depth of the Palestinians’ hatred of Israelis and of Jews, based on, and encouraged by, the texts and teachings of Islam. He wanted to help the Arabs, thinking that they would respond in kind. He went before Israel’s High Court to argue a claim on behalf of some Bedouins who believed some of their land had been wrongly taken by the state, and won their case. He worked to bring Gazan Arabs into Israel for medical treatment. He did all this, but of course none of that would have mattered to his Hamas captors, to whom he may have spoken in the period between his seizure in Israel at Kibbutz Nir Oz, and his murder in Gaza. He is dead, but his widow and family, and all the other families who had their relatives raped, tortured, murdered, or taken hostage, likely have had their hopes for “two states living side by side in peace” smashed on the reef of Muslim hatred, and may never be so full of naïve hope again, or rather, their hope now is more likely to be for an Israel that understands what monsters it is facing, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to devastate those who want to destroy the Jewish state and its people.
The kibbutzim are inhabited by those who believe in small-scale socialism. Politically on the left, readers of the far-left paper Haaretz, many of them are supporters of the Meretz Party that clings to that will-o’-the-wisp, the so-called “two-state solution,” with Palestinians and Israelis living side by side, in a Middle Eastern version of Edward Hicks’ “The Peaceable Kingdom” in which the lion lies down with the lamb. Some have even believed they were “living side by side in peace” with the Palestinians in Gaza until, on October 7, 2023, 6,000 members of Hamas, accompanied by hundreds of Gazan civilians who wanted to join in the fun, smashed into Israel, where they proceeded to rape, torture, mutilate (breasts sliced off, genitalia cut off, eyes gouged out from people who were still alive), and murder 1,200 Israelis in ten kibbutzim and at the Nova music festival. That was the day when the Israeli left was mugged by reality.
Those who live in the kibbutzim have historically taken a soft line toward the Palestinians, helping tens of thousands of them to find employment in Israel that provided them with wages three to four times greater than what they could earn in Gaza, a program that ended, for security reasons, with the outbreak of the Gaza war, and also helping them — as Oded Lifshitz did — to transfer Gazans who needed advanced medical treatment to Israeli hospitals for their care.
The last wounded words on his life and death surely belong to Lifshitz’s widow, Yocheved, who like Oded had all her life been a peace activist, and made this searing statement: “He was a staunch advocate for peace, he had great relations with Palestinians, and one of the things that hurts the most is that they betrayed him and took him down to hell after he fought for them his whole life.”
They betrayed him, and they murdered him, as they did so many other helpless Israeli civilians. And many of those Israelis who had been peace activists have been permanently disabused, and will now call for the total destruction of the Palestinian terror groups. Most Israelis no longer trust any of the Palestinians. In the most recent opinion poll, only 21% of Israeli Jews — less than half the percentage in 2017 — supported the concept of a “two-state solution.” More than two-thirds of them — 71% — now support the annexation by Israel of all of Judea and Samaria. Hamas’ terrorist attack on October 7, 2023 has brought many Israelis, and especially those once on the left, such as Yocheved Lifshitz, to their senses. Now they know what Palestinians applaud, reward, and participate in: the rapes, the tortures, the mutilations, the murders of helpless Israelis, including the kind and gentle great-grandfather Oded Lifshitz, whose body is finally home.