Yocheved Lifshitz looked frail and pale, surrounded by her 10 grandchildren, in the photo they took in Tel Aviv hospital where she was still recovering from 18 days in detention. Her slightly lost gaze under her short-cropped black hair crowns a small figure that seems lost in a black cotton outfit.

In the video posted by Hamas on its Telegram channels just hours after her release on Tuesday, October 24, members of the Islamist movement seemed to be taking great care to walk in small steps beside the 85-year-old, holding her arm before handing her, along with 79-year-old Nourit Kuper, over to the Red Cross. Did they even know who she was?

"Yes, she told them, and with great anger," her grandson Daniel told Le Monde. Yocheved Lifshitz and her husband Oded, three years her junior, were abducted on October 7 from the Nir Oz kibbutz the couple founded in 1952. They had always been tireless activists for Palestinian rights. Their daughter Sharone, who left London for Tel Aviv after her parents' kidnapping, recounted how Oded Lifshitz even met the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasser Arafat, in the mid-1990s. Arafat moved to Gaza, some three kilometers from the kibbutz, after having just received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 along with former Israeli prime ministers Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin for their efforts to bring about the peace that today seems so far away.

Yocheved also told her captors that a few weeks before their kidnapping, the Lifshitzes were still regularly driving sick people from Gaza to Israeli hospitals for treatment... The entire Lifshitz family, by the way, is active in Shalom Akhshav (Peace Now, in Hebrew), a movement that advocates "a reasonable compromise between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples." In a tragic irony of history, the Hamas militants could not have been unaware that their prisoner and her husband are Israelis who tirelessly protest against the conditions in which Palestinians live in the open-air prison of Gaza.

The reason why Hamas so complacently broadcasted the video of Yocheved Lifshitz's release was that, with one gesture and one word, the captive reminded them of her family's commitment. Just before she leaves him, the old lady turns to shake hands with her armed, hooded captor, and distinctly murmurs "shalom," the Hebrew word for "peace," that is also a greeting. For 48 hours, the gesture and the "shalom" have shaken Israeli society already deeply traumatized by the 1,400 deaths and some 200 kidnappings perpetrated by Hamas during their surprise attack on October 7.

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