A defiant Israeli hostage stared down a Hamas terrorist as she was released from captivity Tuesday.
Video showed Rimon Kirsht, 36, giving a piercing look to an armed, masked Hamas terrorist in military garb while another man wearing a mask and holding an AK-47 stood behind her. She then wrapped her arm around another hostage released with her and walked toward Red Cross employees awaiting her.
Hamas terrorists abducted her along with her husband, Yagev Buchshtav, 34, who is still in captivity, from their home in southern Israel during the Oct. 7 attacks. "I love you, mom. I'm so sorry I can't be there with you," Kirsht said in a voice message to her mother as the attack was happening, according to the Times of Israel.
She was with her husband throughout her captivity. When the terrorists told her she, but not her husband, would be released, she said she would not leave unless he was allowed to come with her, according to Israel Hayom. She left only when her captors told her she could either come willingly or by force.
Kirsht was one of three hostages who appeared in a video Hamas released in late October. She sat silently along with fellow hostage Yelena Trupanob as Danielle Aloni, another kidnapped woman, accused Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu of failing to protect Israelis from the attacks and of failing to bring home those in captivity. Netanyahu called the video "cruel psychological propaganda." The two hostages who appeared with Kirsht have also been released.
As hostages have been reunited with their families as part of a temporary truce between the Jewish state and the terror group, reports have surfaced of the horrors they faced during their time with Hamas—including receiving beatings with sticks during their abduction and having bleeding wounds upon their release.
Eighty-five-year-old hostage Yocheved Lifshitz, whom Hamas released early in the war, recounted that she confronted Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar when he visited her inside a Gaza tunnel. She asked him "how he is not ashamed to do such a thing to people who all these years have supported peace," but he did not answer, she said. Lifshitz and her husband, who remains in captivity, are peace activists who helped sick Gazans receive hospital care.