Four dead hostages, including the Bibas family, handed over to Israel by Hamas

February 20, 2025 • 6:30 am

The inevitable happened this morning: Hamas turned over four dead bodies of Israeli hostages, encased in black boxes. And, contrary to my expectations, there was a ceremony, with posters blaming the deaths on Netanyahu and the Red Cross there signing documents.  The bodies included the Bibas family (Shiri Bibas and her two children. four-year-old Ariel and 9-month old Kfir) and Oded Lifshitz, identified by Matti Friedman in the Free Press as “a grandfather, journalist and peace activist who was 83 when he was kidnapped from the same kibbutz, Nir Oz.”

To get those bodies back, Israel had to release 100 Palestinian prisoners, including a Gazan woman who had held hostages in her flat.

Here is a video of the turnover of the bodies, taken as a live feed. It’s quite long but you can scroll through it. Start at the beginning:

A couple of photos from Sheri Oz’s article in Israel Diaries.  First, a poster hanging over the coffins, reading “The War Criminal Netanyahu & His Nazi Army Killed Them with Missiles from Zionist Warplanes.”  Of course they blame the deaths on the IDF. There’s a picture of a ghoulish Netanyahu with blood-dripping fangs looming over the dead hostages.  We did not know the identity of the dead hostages until about two days ago.

The Red Cross signing documents.  What kind of documents do they need? The Red Cross has behaved shamefully during all this time, even refusing to bring needed medications to the hostages:

Hamas carrying a coffin:

Lots of spectators came to see the show, with some bringing their children:

From Matti Friedman’s article, “The family that never came home.”  He is angry and sees this as a symbol of Israel’s failure to achieve the goals of this war:

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.

. . .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.

I have nothing to add.  The “ceremony” instantiates the evil that is Hamas.

22 thoughts on “Four dead hostages, including the Bibas family, handed over to Israel by Hamas”

  1. Can we please stop this fallacy of logic that it matters at all whether the actual final death blow to these innocent children and their terrified mother was from an errant Israeli airstrike or some other means? The only question is whether any of the 1300+ victims–including these 3–would still be alive if crazed murderers hadn’t invaded their homes and lands and either outright killed them or abducted them. The answer is obvious. And we already know–seen on videos they took themselves–that these same invaders murdered other children, raped other mothers, did heinous torturous things to other innocent people who were going about their lives. The scary thing is that supposedly intelligent, logical people around the world–college professors and students, influencers and politicians–will repeat this “it was Israel’s fault” nonsense with a total lack of understanding or irony. Hatred can truly warp the mind.

    1. Thank you, I am horrified that seemingly intelligent people view the terrorists as the poor victims, it’s as though most of the world is blind to reality.

    2. Thank you Mice. This business is all so horrible, I just did not know what to say this morning, but you have said it all very well.

    4. Very well said. One addition: the NGO’s whose employees helped Hamas during the horrific October 7th massacres and their aftermath need to be ostracized by every decent person and government on this planet. Based on the way I understood Dr. Coyne’s essay above, that may include the Red Cross if the organization was able but refused to provide humanitarian assistance to Hamas’s hostages.

    5. This is part of the cause for the low opinion of academics among the masses. It was obvious to all who can see that this was a heinous act by Hamas and Gazans (many civilians were involved), yet university students and professors actively supported the murderers with very little pushback from anyone at the schools with the exception of some Jewish student groups. The hatred they have for Israel and the Jewish people is staggering – they act as if the victims are vermin. They are today’s Nazis.

    1. Thank you David. In my rant over the fallen sources the other day, I forgot to list your Democracy Chronicles as one of my still trusted sources along with WEIT, TWiV, etc. sorry for the omission.

  4. I hardly need to say how vile Hamas is.

    I’m appalled at the Red Cross. How dare they? They are supporting Hamas instead of condemning them.

    Also we don’t know how the Bibas family died. It might have been an Israeli rocket but that could just be more Hamas lies.

    Not that it matters, as commenter Mice has pointed out in comment #1.

    1. I don’t understand the behavior of the Red Cross in this war. It’s an ugly, bad look they’ve displayed. Where is their “principle of neutrality”? I can’t remove the image of the husband of the Bibis family from my memory. He didn’t look like the same man when hamas released him in their usual humiliating manner. Such a disgrace. A sombre morning.

      1. The red cross failed us during the Holocaust and now. They are complicit they do not need to take part in Hamas propaganda parade but they do.The Red Cross in 1944: “We found no trace of installations for exterminating civilian prisoners in Auschwitz”
        Red Cross in 2023: “We found no evidence of weapons or hostages being kept in hospitals in Gaza” “The Red Cross knew about the Nazi atrocities as early as August 1942. In February 1945, the President of the Red Cross wrote to a U.S. official: “Concerning the Jewish problem in Germany we are in close and continual contact with the German authorities.” The fact that the head of the Red Cross would use the Nazi phraseology — “the Jewish problem” — may also be an indication of the organization’s attitude that Jews were more of a problem than a people who were being annihilated.” They apologized years and years later about the Holocaust. But once again they have proven to not care about us Jews. I will not donate anything to them not even my blood. I won’t forgive them and they need to be held accountable.

        1. Thanks for informing me. Sorry to say I was ignorant of that history. I know a lot of people who refuse to donate to them for various reasons — here’s another.

        3. Please try to find it in your heart to give blood. You really could save a life. In Canada, it’s easier. The Canadian Red Cross forever disgraced itself over the tainted blood scandal. The government took the blood donation function away from it and created the Canadian Blood Service which does it all now, from collection through testing and processing to the release of blood products to hospital blood banks, at no charge to patients.

          I used to donate money to the Canadian Red Cross for domestic disaster relief but I have stopped since the Oct 7 war — compromised again!

          But a blood donor is not “giving” any blood to the Red Cross (or CBS.) It all goes to some patient in need somewhere. Even if the Red Cross were, somehow, shipping blood to Gaza to transfuse Hamas battle casualties, it would still be morally right to do that.

  5. At 3h14m noble juvenile males, not content with wantonly frolicking and ululating during the transfer, for good measure climb and hitch a ride on the sides of the Red Cross vehicles as they are departing.

  6. Looked at a post by Scott Galloway on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/profgalloway.com/post/3limfixyucc2g that said “May their memories be a blessing”.
    The comments are probably 50% of the same sentiment, with the rest either blaming Israel for their deaths or sticking up for Hamas, such as this gem “Hamas is a resistance group, fighting for the survival of their people. Israel is a genocidal entity”, or this clever and witty comeback to someone calling out antisemitism: “Zionist scum.” Or this: “‪Cloud Blood‬ ‪@cloudblood.music: I followed just to post this. It’s a song I wrote with the lyrics “Zionists are Jewish Nazis” F*** OFF ZIONIST”

    Same types of comments under the NPR report about this.
    I thought I was done with Bluesky a month ago or so but got drawn back in with the cool space photos. I think I’m done now. There are some really horrendous people on there.
    I know, there are on all of ’em. But this kind of thing is particularly hard to stomach. I can stand Musk’s immature humor on X much better than the celebration of the murder of innocent Israeli children on BS.

  7. The Times of Israel reports:

    “IDF: Remains of Kfir and Ariel Bibas ID’d, but 3rd body sent by Hamas is not their mom Shiri.

    Army says the boys were ‘brutally murdered’ in November 2023 when they were 10-months-old and 4-years-old, demands that Hamas ‘return Shiri home, along with all of our hostages”

  8. A reminder that the likes of PZ Meyers and his Horde are water-carriers for the black-clad Nazis we see in those pictures.

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