I started writing this article on the day of the funerals of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas.
Many of you will know they are the mother and her two wonderfully red-head babies who were kidnapped by allies of Hamas when they invaded Israel on 7 October 2023.
It was one of the many war crimes perpetrated that day by Hamas and its supporters. Every hostage, every victim of the war crime of hostage-taking, deserves the same consideration.
However, the focus on the Bibas family is because they became icons of the depravity of Hamas and its allies.
The harrowing video of their capture* and the many photos of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir became the symbol of the unspeakable horror of hostage-taking on 7 October.
Screenshot from video footage of the kidnapping of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas
They are not more deserving of our attention than any other hostage − released, in captivity or murdered. But, to Israelis and to Jews worldwide they are a most profound symbol of the genocidal anti-Semitism that imbues the jihadis with purpose.
There is a profound darkness represented by the capture and murder of the children: in particular, that, at just nine months, Kfir Bibas was the youngest hostage taken.
The highly regarded Brendan O’Neill, chief political writer for sp¡ked, writes that the death of the Bibas family is a stain on the human conscience. (I introduced the late John Kane-Berman to sp¡ked. He became a huge fan.)
Who takes a baby hostage? Why does anyone take a baby, a little civilian, hostage?
Most of the “ceremonies” associated with the return of the remains of the dead hostages were intended to cause maximum pain and horror to those who watched − Israelis, Jews and other people around the world whose sense of morality abhors what Hamas et al did.
Met Yasser Arafat
The fourth hostage returned at the same “ceremony” was that of 84-year-old Oded Lifschitz. Oded was a journalist and veteran campaigner for peace who drove sick Palestinians to hospitals in Israel for treatment. In his campaign for Palestinian rights, he met Yasser Arafat, then head of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).
The coffins were painted black. There was a huge poster behind the stage with a photo of the family and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu leering over them − literally demonised. Hamas accused Netanyahu of responsibility for their murders through an Israeli airstrike. And, as it transpired after post-mortems were performed, the body of the mother, Shiri, wasn’t her. It was that of an unknown Palestinian woman.
Even the otherwise repugnant Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, and the UN rights chief Volker Turk of the grossly misnamed UN Human Rights Committee condemned the spectacle.
But nothing that happened during Hamas’s macabre and deranged “handing-over ceremony” of the Bibas family was new. Note the slogan on the poster − “We never forgave nor forgot. Al-Aqsa Flood was Our Promise”. “Al-Aqsa Flood” was the name given to the invasion by Hamas. Gunmen, armed with automatic weapons and with their faces concealed, stood proudly next to the coffins of the baby and his toddler brother.
Ordinary Gazans filled the area and celebrated by throwing rice at the proceedings − a Middle Eastern tradition during celebrations to symbolise good fortune and happiness. It was a day’s outing where Gazan parents brought their children to watch the “ceremony”. The atmosphere was festive and Hamas was broadcasting it as such. Hamas was proud and displayed strength at having stolen and murdered a baby and a toddler.
They were proud of their deaths, pretending that they died in an Israeli airstrike. The post-mortems subsequently conducted by Israeli forensic experts revealed that the little boys were strangled by their captors, and their bodies desecrated with stones and rocks to look as if they had been killed in an airstrike.
Parading dead children as trophies
Haviv Rettig Gur, the acclaimed Times of Israel journalist, historian and podcaster, devoted a podcast to the spectacle. He said it was a glorification of victory by parading dead children as trophies.
Rettig Gur referred to psychoanalysts who tried to analyse why Isis screened videos of the beheadings of their hostages for all the world to see. Why would they broadcast their atrocities?
The conclusion was that these were “recruitment videos”. The message from Isis was: if anyone watching found these crimes fascinating, empowering, a source of self-esteem and strength; or found themselves attracted to the power of holding someone prisoner and then cutting their head off while they screamed, then they should join Isis.
Rettig Gur says that is what Hamas has been telling the Palestinians: that they too can hold Jewish children in this way, they will be in their power, and they will do it for God. It will feel righteous.
About 20,000 Hamas terrorists have been killed during the war. Hamas has had to recruit replacements on a significant scale. The average age of current recruits is 16 and a half.
But for Rettig Gur there was more to it. Hamas’s cruelty is purposeful.
On 14 July 2014, in the middle of the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas, a senior Hamas spokesman, Sami Abu Zuhri, gave an interview on the official Hamas television network, Al-Aqsa TV, in Gaza.
Abu Zuhri was asked about criticism of Hamas for dragging the Palestinians into what was then considered one of the most devastating wars Gaza had experienced. He told the interviewer that Gazans were paying a price but were “remembering our brothers” in the Algerian civil war which had “at least a million and a half martyrs”.
Cost of an anti-colonial war
He said that Hamas was not leading Gazans to execution; rather Hamas was “leading them to confrontation”. He was saying that this was the cost of an anti-colonial war like Algeria’s.
For liberation, the death of Gazans was a price worth paying.
Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which holds the restorationist idea that if the Jews can be removed from Muslim land, conquered and dominated by Islam, then in some profound way Islam could begin its long road back to prominence, relevance, power, conquest and thus, ultimately, the redemption of the world.
This ideology enables Hamas’s leaders to systematically plan the destruction of Gaza. This is why Hamas’s tunnel system is the biggest thing Palestinians have ever built. The tunnels were built for the purpose of fighting a war that would destroy Gaza, while allowing Hamas to arise from the rubble. Since they regarded Israelis as monsters − the evil enemies of God − Hamas expected even more destruction than Gaza actually suffered. The tunnels would force the enemy to cut through cities to get to them.
Rettig Gur says that if one thinks of the Israelis as monsters, the tunnel system is doubly monstrous, because the damage Hamas expected to be inflicted on Gazans would be an order of magnitude higher.
Hamas believes in permanent violent confrontation: they have a promise from God that they cannot fail; all Palestinian suffering is redemptive. Every failure is only a test of faith ahead of the inevitable victory.
Rettig Gur explains that this was fundamental to “the mental infrastructure” that drove Hamas to launch suicide bombings in the 1990s that temporarily derailed the peace process; to launch suicide bombings in the Second Intifada from 2000; and ultimately to derail peace permanently.
Fundamental strategy
7 October was not an outlier; it was the apotheosis of Hamas’s fundamental strategy. It was not emotionally driven or chaotic. It was intended to be joyful. The videos of the macabre hand-over ceremonies carry the same message as the body cams of the insurgents running through Jewish towns and villages, murdering everyone they saw: children, parents, the elderly and even pets.
As at six months after 7 October, Israel’s National Insurance reported that among the 814 civilians murdered by Hamas and its allies who had been identified:
- three were babies under the age of three (one died 14 hours after delivery by emergency caesarean after her mother was shot);
- two were between three and five;
- five were between six and 10, and
- 39 were between 11 and 18.
According to Israel’s National Center of Forensic Medicine (Abu Kabir) the proportion of charred bodies was high. Many victims were decapitated, although it wasn’t always possible to tell whether they had been decapitated after being killed. Many had been tortured before they died.
Sustained cruelty, both psychological and physical, is the fundamental strategy of Hamas.
At the time of 7 October, Rettig Gur wrote that its enormity and astonishing cruelty, “and especially … the joy with which it was carried out” wasn’t a miscalculation because Palestinian independence wasn’t the goal. The goal on 7 October, as with the suicide bombings, was simply the complete removal of Jews from the land.
For Hamas there is no compromise: whether one lives or dies is not something that can be challenged in Palestinian politics.
Begs a number of questions
Photographs of Palestinian children killed and injured by the IDF have been central to the opprobrium against Israel. Their tragedy, however, begs a number of questions: Hamas, as a government, has been at war with Israel since 2005, so why have there never been air raid sirens to warn Gazans of Israeli attacks? Why has it always been up to the IDF to warn civilians? Why have Hamas housed very many of their tunnel exits in or under schools, hospitals, UNRWA facilities, homes? Hamas has built more than 360 kms of tunnels underground (on average more than 20 metres deep), greater than the London Underground (where many stations were used as bomb shelters in World War II), but why has it not allowed civilians to enter them for shelter?
For Rettig Gur, no withdrawal will satisfy this impulse. Israeli Jews will not achieve safety from the kind of wild joyful hatred displayed on 7 October, and revealed again as Hamas “celebrated” over the dead body of a baby.
Israel’s “supreme advantage”, according to Rettig Gur, lies in a fundamental misunderstanding of Israel by its enemies. This will only change when the Palestinian national movement sees Israelis as flawed but rooted people, native sons rather than as sunburned Frenchmen in a land not their own.
Gaza cannot be rebuilt if the money goes through Hamas. Hamas is lost because it has set the Palestinian national strategy on an all-or-nothing path, and it doesn’t know how to stop. It has destroyed too much, and caused too much death and suffering to ever admit the strategy is wrong.
The death of baby Kfir taught Israelis that there’s nothing Israel needs to do to take revenge. Hamas is destroying Gaza. Israel’s only task is to protect its own.
In the case of the Bibas family and all the others murdered, raped, maimed kidnapped and traumatised on 7 October, Israel failed. It won’t fail again.
Additional sources:
- *Noa Tishby – https://www.instagram.com/noatishby/reel/DGg28cvxffC/
- Liel Leibowitz, Their Time is Up, Tablet, February 20, 2025, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/bibas-children-israel-gaza
- Aaron Boxerman & Fatima AbdulKarim, Hamas Makes Gaunt Israeli Hostages Thank Captors Before Release, The New York Times, Feb. 8, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/08/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-hostages-prisoners.html
- Sam Harris on Call Me Back With Dan Senor, Understanding the Mind of a Hamas Jihadist, September 2024, youtube.com/watch?v=7r7Ktl82Hp8
[Image: Supplied]
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