Hamas brutally slaughtered three generations in the Bibas family including Shiri’s parents, Shiri and the two Bibas children, while holding the father Yarden hostage for 484 days, where he was starved, tortured and held in a cage.
By Rachel Avraham
Hamas staged a sickening ceremony, where they handed over four bodies to the Red Cross, who were all supposed to be of Israeli hostages. According to Fox News, the four coffins were laid out on stage in front of a grotesque caricature of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a banner that read in English, “The war criminal Netanyahu & his Nazi army killed them with missiles from Zionist warplanes.”
According to the report, on the coffin allegedly containing the remains of Shiri Bibas, there was a photo of the young mother next to the words “arrest date” and the date of the Oct. 7 attacks. In another stab in the back, Hamas handed over four coffins with the wrong keys, thus making the identification process of the bodies take longer. In another jab at the Israeli people, Hamas handed over the bodies to the Red Cross in a ceremony accompanied by music, with Palestinian families with small children gathering to witness Hamas terrorists handing over the bodies of other small Israeli children, Kfir and Ariel Bibas.
United Nations Human Rights Chief, Volker Turk, has condemned the parading of bodies by Hamas, calling it a violation of international law. According to the Daily Post, he stated: “Under international law, any handover of the remains of the deceased must comply with the prohibition of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, ensuring respect for the dignity of the deceased and their families.”
“Hamas parading four coffins onstage to music is evil and depraved,” Israeli UN Ambassador Danny Danon said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “For 16 months, Israel has been fighting a deranged terrorist organization that places no value on human life, especially if it is Israeli or Jewish— all while international institutions like the UN refrained from condemning Hamas and formally demanding the immediate return of our hostages.”
On Thursday, Israel identified the bodies of Ariel and Kfir Bibas, as well as Oded Lifshitz, a grandfather, journalist and peace activist from Kibbutz Nir Oz who was brutally murdered by Islamic Jihad. The Times of Israel reported that forensic specialists were able to confirm that Ariel and Kfir Bibas, the two adorable little red-headed children whose abduction came to be one of the main symbols of the October 7 massacre, were brutally murdered by Hamas in November 2023, one month after they were abducted, when Ariel was four years old and Kfir was 10 months old. According to the forensic experts, they were strangled to death and then their bodies were mutilated, so that Hamas could then blame their deaths on an Israeli airstrike. However, Israeli forensic experts were able to confirm that they were murdered in cold blood, with the terrorists slaughtering the two small Bibas children with their bare hands.
According to the National Institute of Forensic Medicine, who identified the hostage’s remains on Thursday, Lifshitz was murdered in captivity more than a year ago, the Times of Israel reported. However, the fourth body was not Shiri Bibas and the forensic experts were not able to identify who she was. They also said that she was not the body of any of the hostages released so far and was just an anonymous body. “This is a very serious violation by the Hamas terrorist organization, which is required by the agreement to return four dead hostages,” says the IDF. “We demand that Hamas return Shiri home along with all of our hostages. We share the deep sorrow of the Bibas family at this difficult time and will continue to make every effort to return Shiri and all the hostages home as soon as possible.”
After an international uproar, Hamas then proceeded to return Shiri’s body to Israel on Friday, one day after the Bibas children were returned, and it was confirmed to actually be her body on Saturday. According to forensic experts, Shiri was also brutally murdered in the early days of the war. Hamas had also murdered Shiri’s parents Yossi and Margit Silverman on October 7, 2023. In other words, Hamas brutally slaughtered three generations in the Bibas family including Shiri’s parents, Shiri and the two Bibas children, while holding the father Yarden hostage for 484 days, where he was starved, tortured and held in a cage. However, while his time in Hamas captivity has ended, he now is dealing with another impossible reality: he is now a widower who lost his lovely wife, both of his children, his wife’s parents and now has an eerily empty broken home. Prior to October 7, he had a lively home with grandparents, a wife and two adorable red-headed children, Ariel who loved Bat Man and the baby Kfir who was so adorable that he appeared like a doll. Now, three generations of this lovely family is no more thanks to Hamas and the family’s remnants are broken by their loss. According to Haaretz, the Bibas family called for the immediate return of the remaining hostages still in captivity: “There is no more important goal than this. There will be no recovery without them.”
On October 7, 2023, Lifshitz was taken hostage alive at age 84 together with his wife Yocheved, who was released 16 days later for “humanitarian reasons.” The Times of Israel reported that Yocheved stated that her husband had “fought for the Palestinians his whole life — they betrayed him and took him to hell.” Lifshitz had a distinguished career as a journalist writing for Al-Hamishmar, which was associated with the kibbutz movement. According to the Times of Israel, he defended Bedouins who were expelled from the Sinai Peninsula in the 1970’s and was one of the first Israeli journalists to report on the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon. More recently, Lifshitz was involved with an organization called Road for Recovery, an organization that helps Palestinians get medical treatment in Israel. According to the Times of Israel, every week, he traveled to the Erez Crossing to pick up sick Gazans and drove them personally to hospitals in Israel in order to get treatment. However, Hamas did not grant Lifshitz any preferential treatment, despite all of the good deeds he has done for the Palestinian people. Like so many other Israeli hostages, his end was to be brutally murdered for the crime of being Jewish.
