THE PAIN STRUCK DEEP FOR SHARON LIFSHITZ as the truce between Israel and Hamas broke down early this month. Her 85-year-old mother, Yocheved, had been among the first hostages to be freed by Hamas in late October, even before the brief halt in hostilities a month later to swap some of the captives it seized in its unprecedentedly bloody October 7 raid on Israel in exchange for Palestinian security prisoners held in Israeli jails. Her 83-year-old father, Oded, is still in Gaza somewhere. She does not know if he is alive.
“Our loved ones are dying slowly in Gaza. My father is probably a mile from here. He’s not far, he’s not in another world. You can walk it in half an hour,” Lifshitz told in the burned ruins of her parents’ house in Kibbutz Nir Oz, just three fields away from the Gaza Strip. “They are there. They are dead or they are dying. We don’t even know,” she said.
