For 16 months, the smiling faces of Shiri Bibas and his two young children, Ariel and Kfir, slowly retired against the background of Israeli life as their photographs – published on walls and bus stops immediately after the abduction of the family in Gaza in the ‘ October 2023 – He began to vanish, tear and peel.
On Friday, the lives of the Bibas and the disturbing deaths were taken up at the front line in the collective consciousness of Israel in such a surprising and disturbing way that it triggers a new alarm on the long -term fate of the fragile ceased the fire in Gaza. The truce seemed ready to continue for the weekend, while both sides were preparing for another exchange of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners on Saturday, but the turmoil on the Bibas family intensified doubts about an extension.
On Friday morning, the Israeli army announced that Mrs. Bibas’s body nominally returned, together with those of her children, from Hamas to Israel Thursday – seemed to be someone else’s. And an autopsy of the two boys, aged between 4 and 8 months at the time of their kidnapping, revealed that the terrorists killed them in Gaza “with bare hands”, said the military.
A high Hamas official, Mousa Abu Marzouq, said in a telephone interview that the family was killed in an Israeli air attack in November 2023, rejecting the accusation that a small militant group that held the hostages, the Mujahideen brigades, He had killed them. But Mr. Abu Marzouq recognized that Mrs. Bibas’s body may have been kept in Gaza by mistake, saying that Hamas’ members were now looking for his remains in a place where the family had been buried together with the Palestinians.
Neither could be verified independently.
The news triggered a paroxyism of fury and agony in Israel rarely seen by the tumultuous times that followed the attack led by Hamas on October 7, 2023, when they were killed up to 1,200 people and 251 were kidnapped, including Mrs. Bibas and her children , the most fatal day in Israeli history.
For the Palestinians, the devastation caused by Israel’s military response to the incursions of October 7 – a reaction that, among other consequences, has razed razed due to Palestinian burials and killed thousands of children including some younger people than Kfir Bibas – ha Hamas’ terrorist attacks at the beginning of the war has long been obscured.
But the Israelis remain deeply traumatized by the assault of October and the return of the Bibas Boys, combined with the uncertainty on where the mother is located and the unspected way that Hamas paraded their coffins on Thursday, revived the torment.
Responding to the announcement of the military, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel returned to the language of revenge which defined his speeches in the aftermath of the attack on October 7th.
“May God avenge their blood,” said Netanyahu in a speech recorded at the nation on Friday morning. “And we will also have our revenge.”
Netanyahu’s response reabbiente was maintained in most of the Israeli political spectrum. Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister, said in a transmission interview that the treatment of Bibas showed how “the majority of the Gazas wants to kill all the Israelis”. (The survey last autumn suggested that less than 40 percent of the Palestinians of Gaza supported the attack of 7 October, decreasing from over 70 % at the beginning of last year.)
This combination of vulnerability and revenge was aggravated by the news during the night which, according to Israeli security services, the terrorists had detonated bombs on several buses in Central Israel. The vehicles were empty at the moment. The commentators said that the attacks were probably a response to the Israeli military operations in progress in the employed West Bank, who churned out tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homes.
For some Israelis, the fate of the Bibas family underlined the need to restart the war to defeat Hamas once and for all. The current respite is destined to spend at the beginning of March unless Hamas and Israel cannot agree on an extension. “The only solution is the destruction of Hamas, and this must not be postponed,” said Bezalel Smotrich, far -right finance minister, in an assignment on social media.
But others asked for calm, claiming that the fate of the Bibas family exemplified the reason why the truce had to be extended to bring home about 70 hostages still kept, both dead and alive, in Gaza.
The leadership of the village of Nir Oz, the hometown of the Bibas, issued a declaration on Friday who invited Israel to “follow our values and the clear requests of the Bibas family right now: release, not revenge. The state must report Shiri By any means, in a way that does not endanger the continuation of the agreement and the immediate release of all the hostages.
Isaac Herzog, the mainly ceremonial president of Israel, also invited the government to “remember our highest duty – to do everything possible to bring home each of our sisters and kidnapped brothers. All of them. Until the last.”
For now, the truce seems to last at least other days. Six living Israeli hostages will be released on Saturday and analysts said that it was unlikely that Israel would do anything to jeopardize their freedom. Hamas announced their names on Friday morning, projecting a sense of business as usual.
The six included two Israelian citizens-Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed-which were captured by Hamas years before the 2023 attack after the two entered Gaza of their agreement. Israel said he received a list of hostages expected for release and that he informed their families, but he did not immediately confirm that he is the same six appointed by Hamas.
The long -term future of the truce seemed even less clear. According to the terms agreed in January, the parties should have started the negotiations for the extension of the agreement almost three weeks ago, but they have not yet done so.
On Friday, Arab leaders would have met in Saudi Arabia to try to eliminate a proposal for the reconstruction of the post -war period of Gaza who would have allowed the peaceful transfer of power from Hamas to an alternative Palestinian administration.
But in Israel, analysts have hypothesized that the government would prefer to expel Hamas by force.
“If it is up to Netanyahu and its associates of far-right coalition, then next week-after the end of the first stage of the hostage agreement with the return of four other hostage-Sarà bodies set the road to renew the war In Gaza, “wrote Amos Harel, a commentator for military affairs for Haaretz, a leftist newspaper. “This time, they promise, without restrictions.”
The report was provided by Adam Rasgon in Jerusalem, Johnatan Reiss in Tel Aviv, e The cartilage of Sheikh Ahmad In Haifa, Israel.