"All thy enemies have opened their mouth against thee: they have hissed,
and gnashed with the teeth, and have said: We will swallow her up: lo,
this is the day which we looked for: we have found it, we have seen it." Lamentations 2: 16
I watched the
video of the capture of
Shiri Bibas, an Israeli mother, and her two babies Ariel and Kfir, and cringed as I saw the attackers place their hands upon her. I will go to my death haunted by the horror. Then the monsters held back Shiri's body for unknown reasons. From
The Free Press:
Shiri Bibas was seized from her home on October 7, 2023, along with
her children Ariel, 4, and Kfir, 9 months. Their remains were returned
to Israel after 10 a.m. local time. With them was the body of Oded
Lifshitz, a grandfather, journalist, and peace activist who was 83 when
he was kidnapped from the same kibbutz, Nir Oz.
For Israelis,
October 7 is a slow-release catastrophe. Hamas has bargained not just
over every Israeli hostage and corpse, but also over scraps of
information about their fate, meaning that the precise death toll from
the war’s first day is still not clear. Some of those we hoped were
still alive turn out to have been dead from the very beginning—like
Shlomo Mantzour, a grandfather taken at age 85 and thought to be the
oldest Israeli hostage until last week, when new information revealed he
was killed 16 months ago.
No captives have focused public
sentiment like the Bibas children, the youngest Israeli hostages.
Footage from October 7 showed a terrified Shiri Bibas cradling a baby
and a toddler as they were taken at gunpoint from their home. The two
redheads quickly became symbols of the 250 Israelis taken hostage—icons
not just of the inhumanity of the Palestinians who kidnapped and
murdered civilians and celebrated this barbarism as a victory, but of
the unthinkable weakness of the Israeli state that allowed this to
happen.
After their capture, the Israeli military said Shiri and
the children were in the hands of a small and previously unknown Gazan
faction. Video footage showed the children’s father, Yarden, covered in
blood on the back of a motorcycle, surrounded by dozens of men as he was
taken away separately. He survived 15 months in captivity and was
recently returned as part of the current ceasefire deal.
Later,
another video surfaced showing Shiri and the children being herded into
Gaza by a half-dozen men. This was the last glimpse of them. (Read more.)
How anyone can be triumphant about the killing of a terrified mother and her small children is beyond my comprehension but apparently it is cause for a holiday in Gaza. From Dissection of the War:
Following the completion of the forensic identification, the IDF
representative informed the Bibas family that two of the bodies were
indeed the babies Ariel and Kfir, who, according to the evidence, had
been brutally murdered in captivity by Hamas in November 2023. Just
around the time when they should have come home with the other women and
children, but Hamas claimed at the time that they had “lost” them.
As if that wasn’t horrific enough, the assessment process determined
that the body labeled as Shiri Bibas was not only NOT the boys’ mother,
but not even one of the other hostages on record. It was in fact an
anonymous unidentified body.
This is a violation of the utmost
severity, and even I, who wish for nothing more than for all of the
hostages to be returned to Israel, believe that this must be met with
severe consequences. When will their actions since the October 7
Massacre be declared war crimes, when will they face justice?
To get some idea of the sickness in the soulless mind of Hamas, understand this.
On Thursday:
1.
Photos from the handoff showed entire Gazan families, hundreds of
“innocents” watching the sick ceremony, along with infants and toddlers.
They murder our babies and from age zero, they educate their own
children how to continue the cycle of hate and genocide. A Gazan woman
interviewed on the ground said, “I feel so proud. We took their
prisoners out of our house, whom we had guarded throughout the war.” At
one point they invited all the young ones who had been brought to the
area by the parents to come on stage, where they danced, spit on the
coffins and cursed Jews, and behaved as if they were in the ball pit at
Gymboree. I have seen the video, and it made me ill.
2. The banner
on the stage featured a terrifying Vampire Netanyahu looming over the
four hostages – who were, if you recall, dragged into Aza alive and were
being returned dead, in boxes – smiling and happy, as if they had spent
503 days on vacation in Paradise. (Side question: Who the Hell is
printing up these banners?) (Read more.)
Shiri Bibas was handed over at last to the Red Cross in the middle of the night and is now in Israel where her husband and what remains of her family can mourn for her and her beautiful little boys. From Break Free Media:
The IDF statement came hours after it was discovered that Hamas had
not returned the body of the boys’ mother Shiri, sending instead the
body of a Gazan woman and later claiming that there had been a mix-up
with the bodies during an Israeli airstrike.
“The terrorists did
not shoot the two young boys — they killed them with their bare hands.
Afterward, they committed horrific acts to cover up these atrocities.”
“This
assessment is based on both forensic findings from the identification
process and intelligence that supports these findings. We have shared
these findings, intelligence and forensics with our partners around the
world so they can verify it,” said Hagari. (Read more.)
From Flashpoints and Frontlines:
On October 7, 2023, Kfir Bibas was nine months old. His brother,
Ariel, was four. Their mother, Shiri, tried to shield them with her
body. Their father, Yarden, was taken with them—only to be released to a
world where his wife and sons were gone. I don’t know how a person
survives that kind of grief.
I am a father of two young boys,
almost exactly the same ages as Ariel and Kfir. I know what it’s like to
scoop up my son when he cries in the night. I know the weight of my
son’s body when he clambers into my lap, tucking his head into my chest,
trusting that I will keep him safe. I know how they smell after a bath,
how sweaty their heads get when they sleep, how their laughter echoes
through my home.
I also know the terrifying weight of the
responsibility that comes with loving them. Because the truth is, no
matter how strong I think I am, no matter how fiercely I would fight for
them, I can’t actually protect them from everything. No parent can. The
Bibas family was just like mine. Just like yours. They put their boys
to bed at night believing, like all of us do, that there were limits to
how much suffering the world could inflict on the innocent. We were
wrong.
That is why this moment matters. That is why we cannot look away.
There
was a time, not so long ago, when the slaughter of a baby would have
been a moment of universal mourning. A red line, beyond debate. But in
the moral confusion of our era, we no longer live in that world. (Read more.)
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