A Likud candidate tells an 88-year-old former hostage he wishes he could return her to Hamas

On Monday 28 September, Itzik Bonzel — a bereaved father and a Knesset candidate on the Likud list for the 27 October election — published a Facebook post addressed to Yocheved Lifshitz, 88, who was held by Hamas in Gaza and has publicly disputed claims crediting Benjamin Netanyahu with securing the hostages' release. “I wish there was a way to turn back the clock and return you to Hamas,” Bonzel wrote. He went on: “Lifshitz, the person who rescued you from the darkness of the Gaza tunnels was not Miriam Adelson, but hundreds of heroes who entered hell to bring you home alive — some of whom never returned,” adding that “our sons paid with their lives and with the blood of every family in Israel so that you could sit safely in your home.” The Times of Israel reports Bonzel is one of nine candidates handpicked by Netanyahu for a reserved slot; the Jerusalem Post reports he was placed 29th on the slate by Netanyahu and later apologised, saying he wrote in a “storm of emotions” and “did not mean” it.

The post is a primary document — Bonzel’s own account — and was carried on Monday by the Times of Israel, the Jerusalem Post, Haaretz and Arutz Sheva. The framings diverge sharply. Haaretz built its headline around the word “ungrateful,” presenting a Likud candidate telling an October 7 hostage to go back to her captors. Arutz Sheva described a bereaved father lashing out at a former hostage “over her criticism of Netanyahu” — the same act, with the aggrieved party reassigned. The precise content of Lifshitz’s original remarks, and the Adelson claim Bonzel was rebutting, we could not establish from the reporting available; a Yahoo aggregation of the Jerusalem Post piece adds responses attributed to Lifshitz, Yair Golan and Efrat Rayten, but it is a précis of a précis and not quotable.

Assessment: Strip the outrage and this is an argument about credit, which is the domestic face of the same fight running through the Abu Dhabi trip: who knew what before 7 October, and who is therefore permitted to claim the hostages' return. A reserved slot on the slate is not an accident of the primaries — it is the leader’s personal allocation, which is why the post reads inside the campaign rather than beside it. Watch the apology’s construction: “storm of emotions” concedes tone and concedes nothing about the claim. And treat aggregator summaries of Israeli political rows as hostile terrain — the responses circulating under Lifshitz’s name today are third-hand until someone reads the original.