They became a powerful symbol of the hostage crisis of Israel after the video of the attack led by Hamas in 2023 showed Palestinian militants who led a distraught mother who serves her two grandchildren with red hair. Another video showed the father of the same family who was hiding in Gaza on a motorcycle, his bloody head.
Hamas said on Friday that Hamas said that 35 -year -old Yarden Bibas is one of the three male hostages to be released on Saturday.
The Israelis are still impatiently awaiting his wife’s word, Shiri, and their two children, Ariel, now 5 years old, and Kfir, who was 9 months old at the time of her capture – the youngest hostage taken to Gaza. Last week, Daniel Hagari, an Israeli military spokesman, seemed to put the audience for the probability that they do not come out alive, adage The army was “seriously concerned” for the mother and the children.
Hamas said last year that Ms. Bibas and her children were killed by an Israeli air strike, but Israeli officials have never confirmed it. Several hostages were killed in Gaza by Israeli forces, accidentally pulled or perhaps following Israeli air strikes. The army also said a few Civil hostages may have been killed by Israeli forces when they were kidnapped on the day of the October 7 attack.
The Bibas family has gone through “a twisted reality of hell,” said a parent, Yifat Zailer, in a interview Last year.
The family of four was part of more than 180 residents of Kibbutz Nir ozAn agricultural community in the south of Israel, which was killed or removed during the attack on October 7. Since then, the family has become the faces of a national trauma which sparked a fierce Israeli war in Gaza aimed at eradicating Hamas, an assault which killed more than 47,000 Palestinians, according to the health officials of Gaza, who do not distinguish between fighters and civilians.
According to Israeli officials, more than 1,750 people in Israel were killed during the war, including around 1,200. The toll includes more than 890 members of the Israeli military forces.
Throughout a year of waiting, families hostage and their supporters transported orange balloons and worn orange shirts in honor of missing children and their ginger hair. They organized major events to mark the first two birthdays of KFIR, who never celebrated one in captivity.
All the other children seized during the October 7 attack were released in a previous agreement.
According to Israeli media, Israeli officials have pressed Hamas negotiators for more clarity on Ms. Bibas and her children. As a civilian woman with children, they were to be released in the first stages of the ceasefire agreement, before soldiers or men, if they were alive.
Mr. Bibas was removed separately from his family.
In the early morning before his capture, he sent a text to his sister, Ofri Bibas-Levy, to tell him about the new arugula, according to an interview that she gave to Kan, The Israeli public broadcaster. Later, he sent him a text that activists had entered the camp. He had a firearm, he told him, but the activists had automatic rifles.
He then described scenes of confrontation on the Kibbutz and his fear that his two young sons could not be silent.
“It’s like the end,” he wrote to him at 9:10 am.
The video of the October 7 attack against Nir Oz revealed images of activists opening the front door of the Bibas family.
Some time, before her brother was captured, Ms. Bibas-Levy told Kan, he sent her a text to their parents that he loved them. At 9:45 am he wrote: “They are in it.”
Bibas-Levy told Kan that the first she had learned from her brother’s kidnapping on October 7 when she saw a video of activists removing a few days later.
In November 2023, shortly after Hamas said that Ms. Bibas and her children had been killed by Israeli bombardment, the group published a video by Mr. Bibas that was told that his wife and children had been killed, while he was unleashed by crying.
Images of the Bibas family have been seized in the Israeli psyche throughout the crisis. They were on the front page of one of the most popular daily newspapers in the country, Yedioth Ahronoth, under the title “A mother and two small souls, led in the dark”.
And across the country, graffiti representing the family appeared in the streets. Some show a KFIR baby holding a pink elephant, as in the photo used for its hostage poster. Others show an imaginary meeting of the Bibas family, lighting a Hanukka menrah.
“I know they became a symbol,” said Bibas-Levy at a press conference in tears last February. “But for us, it’s our family, and we want them to come back.”
Johnatan Reiss And Matthew Mpoke Bigg Contributed reports.
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