Elma Avraham,84, was a self-sufficient member of the community when she was kidnapped from her Kibbutz Nahal Oz home on October 7, according to her family. Hospital workers said she was in a “fight for her life” when Hamas freed her on Sunday.

On the third day of Israel and Hamas’ truce, the great-grandmother and 16 other hostages—among them a four-year-old American girl—were set free.

While the other hostages are reported to have returned in good health, Avraham’s daughter told reporters her mother arrived with a pulse of 40 and a body temperature of 28 degrees. The deputy administrator of Soroka hospital in Beersheba said her condition remains critical and she is ventilated and sedated in the intensive care unit.

“They held her in terrible conditions,” daughter Tali Amano told reporters outside the hospital. “My mother arrived hours before we would have lost her.”

Amano described her mother as “happy, connected, and embraced by the entire community” before she was taken and said that while her mother had chronic health conditions, they were entirely in check.

“For fifty-two days they kept her in conditions that no human being should be kept in,” the head of medical affairs from the Hostages and Missing Families Forum Hagai Levine said, “Simply without human dignity, unreasonable abuse.”