The Savagery Behind the Handover of Murdered Israeli Infants

Hamas terrorists gather at the site of the handing over of the bodies of four Israeli hostages including the Bibas family, who have become symbols of the hostage crisis that has gripped the region since the Gaza war broke out. (Eyad Baba/AFP)

"[The Bibas family's story is] very, very tragic. It's hard to look at their pictures and not cry for their fate and feel emotional."

"You can see what wonderful people they are, and how sweet the little children are."

"I'm trying to express hope, the optimism that they would be released."

Israeli artist/activist Zeev Engelmayer 

"[Yarden] believes that the claim that Shiri and the children were killed is Hamas's speculation, and if  he believes it -- who are we to say otherwise?"

"We draw strength from him, from his faith."

Jimmy Miller, cousin of Shiri Bibas 

A year or more ago, Hamas informed the IDF that Shiri Bibas and her four-year-old son Ariel, and Kfir, 9 months, were killed in an Israeli Defense Forces airstrike in Khan Younis. Intelligence agents, citing no evidence, refused to give the report authentication, and hopes were high that the three would eventually be returned to Israel through a prisoner exchange. The infants' father, Yarden, had been  kidnapped separately from his family. During his imprisonment he was subjected to psychological torture, informed that his family was dead, his reaction filmed in a video for media distribution.

 

The coffins containing the bodies of, from right to left, Shiri Bibas, her two children, Ariel and Kfir, and Oded Lifshitz, who was 83 when he was abducted, are displayed on a stage before being handed over to the Red Cross by Hamas in Khan Younis on Thursday. (Abdel Kareem Hana/AP)

 

Despite which, or perhaps because of which, their  relatives and supporters held out hope that they would all survive their captivity. "They are breaking into our house ... it feels like the end", the children's father wrote to his sister during the attack on their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz in southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Videos that the terrorists themselves had taken with body cams as they hunted down Israeli civilians, raping, torturing, killing, torching homes with entire families inside, showed Hamas operatives and Palestinian civilians moving house to house slaughtering young and old.

 

In nearby Kibbutz Be'eri, the killing was methodical, consuming hours of butchery. The video of Kfir and Ariel Bibas held by their frightened, traumatized mother, surrounded by men in civilian clothing as they were being taken hostage to Gaza has been familiar to an international audience. It is an iconic picture of a terrified woman and two infants on their journey to an untimely death. There were other mothers and their children who were more promptly and efficiently killed 500 days ago. Their particulars are unknown to a large general public, the Bibas family is recognized through the proliferation of their visages in pleas to bring the hostages home.

 

A drone view shows Palestinians and militants gathering around Red Cross vehicles on Thursday, the day Hamas hands over the bodies of deceased hostages Oded Lifshitz, Shiri Bibas and her two children, Kfir and Ariel Bibas, in the Gaza Strip. (Stringer/Reuters)

Finally, they were to return home. Not as they were, in the blush of youth and health and a promising future. But in three coffins, one adult-sized, and two whose dimensions tore at the heartstrings of Israelis and Jews everywhere, along with their non-Jewish supporters. Yarden Bibas, freed from captivity only weeks earlier, held out hope against hope that they might somehow have survived the intentions of their brutal captors and he would be reunited with them. They are now reunited, not as he wished and imagined, but as their fate dictated.

 

His two tiny sons will be mourned as tradition demands for their grievous loss. Yet, where is his wife? The body that was returned in a coffin purporting to hold Shiri Bibas was not that of his wife, but that of a stranger whose identity is unknown. A woman who was not an Israeli hostage, a corpse of mystery. More mysteriously sinister is the absence of the Bibas babies' mother, the question hovering ghostlike and fearful, where is she, what happened to her, could she still be among the living?

 

Past masters at sadistic savagery, savouring the pain they impose on those they hate, Hamas has a tradition of exacting anguish, delectating and delighting over the prolongation of deep-seated, maddening anguish, viewing it as a victory over the hated. That inhumanity, from the thousands of terrorists who flooded southern Israel to inflict suffering and death on innocent civilians who had in fact commiserated with the Palestinian civilians living in Gaza, arranging to drive them to medical and hospital services in Israel failed to resonate with the world at large. Nor did the sight of thousands of Gazans surrounding the coffin handovers in celebration of a 'victory'.

 

In a march organized by Within Our Lifetime and co-sponsored by Samidoun, according to Within Our Lifetime, pro-Palestinian protesters rallied in midtown Manhattan on Dec. 25. Selcuk Acar / Anadolu via Getty Images

Out of the woodworks throughout the West came tens of thousands of Palestinians and their Muslim and non-Muslim supporters who had migrated from the countries of their origins to Europe and North America, to demonstrate their solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza, characterizing the raw inhumanity unleashed by Hamas and its sister terrorist groups on Israelis on October 7, as 'understandable', as 'resistance to the occupation'. And nor did the media dispute those popularized 'contextual' sympathies.

 

Mobs of pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas supporters flocked to the streets of Western cities to express their delight in the comeuppance of Israel, their solidarity with the 'oppressed' Palestinians, their contempt for a Jewish State that imposed its ancestral presence in the Middle East, as a cohort of white, privileged colonizers, dislodging Arab 'Palestinians' from their homeland, crying out for a global Intifada, citing a 'Final Solution', urging Jews everywhere in the diaspora to 'go back to Poland', the messages unmistakable.  

"We know [Hamas] is using the world attention to terrorize people. Should it be covered? It's complicated. This is reality. People died ..."

"We don't want world media to ignore this very important news."

"[Those already traumatized by these events that this week's hostage release] will not be quiet or respectful."

Professor Hagai Levine, Israeli public health physician/researcher

A protest in Australia during the first Gaza war, August 2006. Justin McManus/Fairfax Media via Getty Image