RELEASED: Yaffa Adar, 85: Video on a golf cart among 1st evidence of hostages
Great-grandmother freed after 49 days in Gaza; captured on October 7 in Kibbutz Nir Oz
Yaffa Adar was released on November 24 as part of a temporary ceasefire deal brokered by Qatar and the United States between Hamas and Israel. This is the story of her capture:
Yaffa Adar loved reading, writing and keeping connected. Even at 85 she often sent her family messages and GIFs on WhatsApp. She was active on Facebook, her granddaughter recalls.
Keeping in close touch online became especially important in recent years as she found it harder to walk beyond her home in Nir Oz, a kibbutz near the Gaza Strip. Amid that physical struggle, she kept her mind busy and knew what she wanted, her granddaughter said.
“She loved reading,” Adva Adar recalled. “So we were like, “We’re going to get you a Kindle.” What did her grandmother say? “‘No, I like the smell of the paper in books.'”
So when Hamas’ October 7 massacre at Nir Oz ended and no one could find Adar, her family worried. That concern turned to horror when video surfaced showing her being driven in a golf cart in Gaza, wrapped in a pink-flowered blanket.
The footage was among the first evidence that Hamas had not only killed Israelis — more than 1,300, the vast majority civilians — but had dragged dozens to Gaza regardless of age in the most complex hostage crisis the country has ever faced.
Some people speculated that Yaffa Adar’s unflinching demeanor in the video perhaps meant she didn’t understand what was happening.
Not her family, which includes three children, eight grandchildren and seven great-grandkids.
“She absolutely knew what was going on around her. She wasn’t going to panic,” her granddaughter said.
What’s frightening now is that her grandmother doesn’t have her medication for blood pressure and chronic pain.
“She was really the glue of our family. She loved her life,” Adva Adar recalls. “She liked good food and she liked good wine. She was very young-minded.”
