WHEN a nation pins its hopes on some sign of light in a dark world of hate and death, on the life of one family, and those tenuous hopes are snatched away with cruel inevitability, where does that nation go from there?
On October 7, 2023, a mother and her nine-month-old baby and four-year-old son were violently kidnapped and taken away to a place where Jews are hated. Shiri’s sons, Kfir and Ariel Bibas, became the ‘poster children’ of the Hamas pogrom and aftermath. Faces that would be recognised across a divided world; faces that any sane person with compassion and a sense of right and wrong would feel concern for, but that supporters of Hamas and haters of Israel would not attempt to conceal their contempt for.
Hamas released their coffins in front of gloating crowds of Palestinian civilians, comprised of adults and children, with a worldwide audience watching on. Nothing better captures the grotesque pit of ideological evil that these ‘freedom fighters’ crawled out from to display their contempt for life itself. The caskets containing the bodies were locked by Hamas and returned without keys. They had to be checked for booby traps before being opened to allow forensic inspection, to enable formal identification. As one former Israeli spokesman has said, ‘Did you think that Hamas would spare the bodies of the Bibas family the indignity of a propaganda spectacle? Think again. We are fighting psychopaths.’
Emulating the Nazi Jewish extermination programme of their heroes, we thought Hamas had already plumbed the depths of evil two weeks ago when they paraded three emaciated hostages in a display of barbarous propaganda. With this latest horror, Hamas has made it clear that their depravity, cruelty and brutality knows no bounds; they won’t stop unless something is done to bring it, and them, to an end.
Yarden Bibas, Shiri’s husband and father of their two sons, was wounded and abducted by Hamas from Kibbutz Nir Oz, when he left their safe room in the hope of distracting the terrorists away from his family. During his 16-month captivity, he was beaten, held in a cage and consistently taunted by his captors about the fate of his wife and children. Torture. Since his release at the beginning of the month, he has been clinging to hope for his wife and young sons.
As if having to cope with the terrible reality of his wife’s and sons’ deaths was not enough, Hamas inflicted a further blow. It was left to Israeli military specialists to discover that the body of the woman was not his wife’s. It was not Shiri, nor was it any of the remaining hostages still imprisoned by the Hamas psychopaths. A sicker form of torture to impose on this husband and father than placing not his wife, but an unidentified body in a coffin to send it to Israel, is hard to imagine. And still, that was not all.
The next ghastly revelation to confront Yarden Bibas was the knowledge, ascertained by forensic investigation of the bodies, that their Palestinian captors has executed little Ariel and Kfir using their bare hands one month after their abduction. There are simply no words I can use on this platform to communicate the full depravity of these animals or the complete and utter disgust I feel, disgust that any decent person must also feel.
Now that any hope of being reunited with his family alive has been dashed for Yarden Bibas, his wife’s body still held in Gaza and knowing the terrible fate of his children, what his mental state must be is just too terrible to contemplate. How will he summon the strength to carry on? We know already that many of the young revellers at the Nova Festival have committed suicide after surviving the Hamas invasion and massacre.
The body of Oded Lifshitz was also released. The world has learnt that this great grandfather, who voluntarily transported sick Gazan children weekly to Israeli hospitals for free medical treatment, was kidnapped on October 7 and murdered by Palestinian Islamic Jihad more than a year ago.
This has to be a defining moment, not just for the Gaza conflict, but for the world – a delineation of who will stand on the side of good, and who will stand on the side of evil.
The reaction of world leaders and other politicians will show just which side of the divide they stand and where their moral compass points. Will they emit empty platitudes stained with hints of equivalence in the deluded notion of keeping the Hamas-supporting hordes onside, as one might expect from Starmer; or will they turn hypocrite like Volker Türk, human rights chief of the Hamas-compliant UN, now keen to be seen to be on the right side of history by denouncing the parading of the bodies; or will they be unequivocal in their response, like Argentinian President Javier Milei, who has declared a national day of mourning for the murdered family?
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, ‘Today the heavens shake. The entire civilized world should condemn these horrific murders. The entire civilized world should join Israel in demanding the immediate release of all the hostages. All of Israel is united in grief.’
I despair that there is so little of the world that today can be called ‘civilised’, as seen in the ambiguous, morally equivalent way the majority of world leaders have dealt with Israel and Palestinian Islamic terrorism. Hamas and their co-conspirators/supporters on the streets, their apologists in the media and politics, and global organisations such as the UN, will feel little pressure to stop their support of violence and calls for genocide, once the shock of the latest revelations and actions inevitably recedes.
Where Israel goes after this is impossible to say. Now is a time of mourning for an innocent mother and her innocent children. May they rest in peace at last, and may their mother be returned and laid to rest in her home soil, as our prayers for her husband continue.
