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:
"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
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:
ShareOn 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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