On February 26, 34-year-old Yarden Bibas laid his wife and two little boys to rest in the Tsoher Cemetery near Kibbutz Nir Oz in Israel. Shiri Bibas was 32 when they were taken. Ariel was four. Kfir was only 8 months old. The mother and her two red-headed sons were buried in the same casket, a short distance away from where they were kidnapped by the sadists of Hamas on October 7, 2023.
For over a year, those who cared wondered what had happened to the Bibas family. On October 7, the world saw the gut-wrenching footage of Shiri clutching her two boys as she looked about with a terror-stricken face at the gun-toting killers surrounding her; on February 19, 2024, the IDF released a short clip of surveillance footage from that same day of Shiri, still clinging to her sons, being herded through a street in Khan Younis, Gaza. Then, for more than a year, nothing.
Yarden Bibas, who had been separated from his family when he left the saferoom of his home in an attempt to distract the invaders, was finally released on February 1 with two other hostages in exchange for 183 Palestinian convicts after 484 days of imprisonment. Hamas claimed that Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir were dead. The family—and all Israel—clung to hope. Orange—the color of the Bibas boys’ hair—became a potent symbol: This week, commemorative orange light illuminated landmarks from the Israeli Knesset to the Empire State Building.
We now know the savage truth about what happened to those two precious boys. Hamas claimed that they had been killed by an Israeli airstrike, and their Western cheerleaders desperately cling to this cruel fiction as if it exonerates the kidnappers rather than condemns them. Why were they in Gaza to begin with? According to Israel’s National Institute of Forensic Medicine, the two children were killed by terrorists in “cold blood” with “bare hands” sometime in November 2023. Or as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put it: “They strangled the tender boys with their bare hands.”
On February 20, Hamas hosted a raucous rally to turn the murdered children and their mother over to the Red Cross. There was cheering and pounding music. Four coffins—including one containing the corpse of 84-year-old peace activist Oded Lifshitz—were placed on a stage with a mural of Netanyahu dripping blood behind them. Hamas put the baby and the boy in adult-sized coffins to avoid the visceral visual of child-sized caskets. On each coffin, Hamas affixed a label: “Date of Arrest: October 7, 2023.” In one final, sickening twist, Shiri’s coffin turned out to contain the body of someone else, and Hamas quietly returned the correct corpse on February 21.
In return for these bodies, Hamas secured the release of approximately 600 live criminals.
Let me pause here to remind you: Around the world, Western academics and activists, to our everlasting shame, for they feel none—leapt to defend the orgy of rape, torture, murder, and kidnapping of October 7 at the time, long before Israel’s military campaign to recover the kidnapped and punish the baby-killers began. I detailed their bloodthirsty celebration here at europeanconservative.com on October 10. These people saw the terrified Shiri and her two red-headed babies, and they rejoiced. They showed us who they are, and we should never, ever forget the day the mask fell away. We should treat them with the utter contempt and revulsion they deserve.
In the year between their kidnapping and their return to Israel in coffins, people tore down hostage posters featuring the faces of Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir. As Douglas Murray grimly noted, that would never happen to posters of missing pets. But for Jewish children? Yes. That happened, and that fact should fill us with shame and rage.
