The Bibas family became a potent symbol of Israel’s hostage crisis after video showed Palestinian militants leading away a distraught mother clutching her two small red-haired sons.
They became a potent symbol of Israel’s hostage crisis after video from the Hamas-led 2023 attack showed Palestinian militants leading away a distraught mother clutching her two small red-haired sons.
Israelis are still anxiously awaiting word of his wife, Shiri, and their two children, Ariel, now 5, and Kfir, who was nine months old at the time of his capture – the youngest hostage taken into Gaza. The Bibas family has been through “a twisted reality from hell,” relative Yifat Zailer said in an interview last year.The family of four were among more than 180 residents of kibbutz Nir Oz, a farming community in southern Israel, who were killed or abducted in the October 7 attack. Since then, the family became the faces of a national trauma that sparked a fierce Israeli war in Gaza aimed at eradicating Hamas.
Israeli officials pressed Hamas negotiators in recent days for more clarity on Bibas and her children, according to Israeli media. As a female civilian with children, they were expected to be released in the initial stages of the ceasefire deal, before soldiers or men, if they were alive.In the early morning hours before his capture, he texted his sister, Ofri Bibas-Levy, to tell her about incoming rocket fire, according to an interview she gave to Kan, the Israeli public broadcaster.
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