Israeli hostage, 85, shown shaking hands with Hamas captor after release

Footage has emerged of the 85-year-old hostage Yocheved Lifshitz shaking hands with one of her Hamas captors and saying “shalom”, a Hebrew greeting meaning “peace”, after being released back to her family.

Lifshitz was released alongside 79-year-old Nurit Cooper on Monday night.

The two women were taken out of Gaza at the Rafah crossing into Egypt, where they were put into ambulances, according to footage shown on Egyptian TV. The two women and their husbands were snatched from their homes in the kibbutz of Nir Oz near the Gaza border during Hamas’s rampage into southern Israeli communities on 7 October. Their husbands, who are 83 and 84, were not released.

“While I cannot put into words the relief that she is now safe, I will remain focused on securing the release of my father and all those – some 200 innocent people – who remain hostages in Gaza,” Lifshitz’s daughter, Sharone Lifschitz, said in a statement.

Lifschitz, an artist and academic in London who uses a different spelling for her surname, told reporters last week that her parents were peace activists, and her father would drive to the Gaza border to take Palestinians to East Jerusalem for medical treatment.

“I grew up, you know, with all these Holocaust stories about how all my uncles’ lives were saved because [of acts of kindness]”, she said last week.

“Do I want that to be the story here?” she asked. “Yeah.”

Hamas apparently received nothing in exchange for the release of the hostages, who were freed days after an American woman and her teenage daughter were also released. Hamas and other militants in Gaza are believed to have taken about 220 people, including an unconfirmed number of foreigners and dual citizens.

On Monday, Hamas released a video showing the handover of Lifshitz and Cooper, with militants giving drinks and food to the dazed but composed women, and holding their hands as they are walked to Red Cross officials. Just before the video ends, Lifshitz reaches back to shake one militant’s hand.

Around the same time, Israel’s internal security service, Shin Bet, released a recording showing prisoners from the Hamas attack – most in clean prison uniforms, but one in a bloody T-shirt and at least one wincing in pain – sitting handcuffed in drab offices talking about the attack. The men said they were under orders to kill young men and kidnap women, children and elderly people, and that they’d been promised financial rewards.

The videos were intended to shape the war’s narrative – with Israel focusing on Hamas’s brutality, and Hamas trying to show a humane side.

The Associated Press could not independently verify either video, and the hostages and the prisoners could have been acting under duress.