AMONG the images captured during the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, is one of Shiri Bibas clutching her two red-headed children, anguish etched across her face. The children — Ariel, aged four, and Kfir, just nine months — appeared to be calm amid the chaotic hostage scene, presumably reassured by the close embrace of their mother. They were seized and transported to Gaza. It was 502 days later that the bodies of the two children were returned to Israel. In a further horrific twist, that of their mother did not follow until the early hours of the Saturday morning — and the body placed in the coffin was that of an anonymous Palestinian woman. “I’m sorry, I cannot yet cry for you,” Bibas Levy, the sister of Shiri’s husband, Yarden, said in a video. “We are waiting for Mommy Shiri.”
It is impossible to imagine the nightmare that Yarden Bibi, released by Hamas on 1 February, is enduring. In December 2023, Hamas released a video in which he appeared, distressed and presumably under duress, blaming the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for the death of his wife and children. Before his release, he appeared on a stage in Khan Younis, waving, surrounded by gunmen. Instead of a dignified handover, the coffins of his children’s bodies were borne by masked men in front of a large crowd. A poster depicting Netanyahu as a vampire was the backdrop. The IDF has said that children were not killed in an Israeli air strike, but murdered in cold blood. Alongside the family’s private grief, the fate of Shiri and her children has become emblematic of Israel’s agonising wait for the return of the hostages. The street art depicting them is a testament to a public willing their survival against the odds. The small group of Israelis who gathered to honour the convoy carrying the bodies of Shiri and her children was multiplied many times for the funeral procession on Wednesday
Sixteen months into the conflict in Gaza, with many thousands dead, some will not pause to mourn with the Bibas family, but point to the number of Gazan mothers and children — including, perhaps, the unnamed woman found in the coffin — killed by Israeli forces. Some will think of Hind Rajab, the six-year-old left stranded alone in the car in which her family had tried to flee Gaza City. After 12 days, both she and the ambulance crew that had set out to reach her were found dead, alongside the other members of her family. On Tuesday, a recording of the call made to the Palestinian Red Cross, first by her cousin — “They are shooting at us”, followed by the sound of bullets and screaming — and then by Hind herself — “They are dead. . . The tank is now beside me . . . Stay with me” — was played to the UN Security Council. Hind stayed on the phone for hours, waiting for help.
The journalist Jonathan Freedland, observing a struggle by some to condemn “full-throatedly” the 7 October atrocities, as if it were a football game, “a binary contest in which you can root for only one team”. Christians, too, should beware of this trap. This week, we join with those who pray for the Bibas family, victims of a terrifying crime, and for all those who loved Hind Rajab, whose small voice also demands our attention.
