Matti Friedman: The Family that Never Came Home
https://www.thefp.com/p/matti-friedman-the-bibas-shiri-kfir-ariel-yarden
The deaths of Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas were too unbearable to believe. Israelis couldn’t accept it until we had no other choice.
Israeli television did not broadcast the ceremony that took place in Gaza this morning. As masked terrorists put four black coffins on a stage in Khan Younis, the channels instead showed photos of the people inside them, taken before the war began—including of an Israeli mother and two redheaded boys, laughing on a couch, picking fruit in an orchard, still believing they’re safe.
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.
Perhaps the oddest aspect of the grief in Israel on Thursday is that the fate of Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir has largely been understood since late 2023. Hamas announced early in the war that the three were dead, killed by an Israeli airstrike. Given the intensity of fire in the early stage of the war and the fact that the military didn’t know where Palestinian fighters were hiding hostages, it seemed possible. And the deaths seemed even more probable when, in November 2023, Hamas returned Israeli mothers and children in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, and the Bibas family wasn’t among them.
The following month, the captors of Yarden Bibas released a coerced video. The distraught 34-year-old, seated against a white wall, is told that his wife and children are dead, and blames Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for killing them.
But Hamas has produced false information about other hostages as a form of psychological warfare, including a report that Daniella Gilboa was killed in an Israeli airstrike. (She was just released alive.) And while Israeli intelligence was able to ascertain the death of other hostages in captivity, there was no confirmation about the fate of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir.
And so Israelis retained hope that the Bibas family would somehow come back alive. The reluctance to accept the worst was less about logic than about their deaths simply being too unbearable to believe—and so simply wouldn’t be believed until we had no other choice. That moment arrived on Thursday morning.
After the war began on October 7, 2023, the Israeli government stated that its goals were the elimination of the Hamas threat and the return of all the hostages. Today, as armed terrorists held a macabre ceremony with the coffins of four Israelis who were kidnapped alive, it was impossible to argue that either goal had been achieved.
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