Oped: Day 484 of the war

As Yarden Bibas is released, relief, dread, and evidence that Hamas is reviving

As the deal progresses, and Netanyahu readies for crucial talks with Trump, Israel’s twin war goals — bringing home all the hostages and removing Hamas from power in Gaza — remain as hard to reconcile as ever

David Horovitz

David Horovitz is the founding editor of The Times of Israel. He is the author of "Still Life with Bombers" (2004) and "A Little Too Close to God" (2000), and co-author of "Shalom Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin" (1996). He previously edited The Jerusalem Post (2004-2011) and The Jerusalem Report (1998-2004).

Yarden Bibas embraces his father Eli and his sister Ofri at an IDF facility near Re'im after his release from 484 days in Hamas captivity, February 1, 2025. (Screencapture/Israel Defense Forces)
Yarden Bibas embraces his father Eli and his sister Ofri at an IDF facility near Re'im after his release from 484 days in Hamas captivity, February 1, 2025. (Screencapture/Israel Defense Forces)

En route to Saturday morning’s mercifully brief handover events for hostages Yarden Bibas, Ofer Calderon and Keith Siegel, masked and armed Hamas terrorists were filmed hanging from the sides of a convoy of white pickup trucks, riding through Gaza City.

Watched by Israelis as they awaited the release of the three hostages, the sight of those vehicles recalled, precisely as Hamas intended, the images from early on Shabbat morning, October 7, 2023 — when the unfathomable footage of terrorists in white trucks driving through the streets of Sderot first indicated that something unprecedentedly terrible was unfolding.

Fourteen days into the 42-day first phase of the current deal for the release of 33 hostages in exchange for the release of almost 2,000 Palestinian security prisoners from Israel and a Gaza ceasefire, Saturday’s fourth set of hostage releases was the most wrenching to date.

There was no repeat of Thursday’s despicable handover at Khan Younis, when Gadi Mozes, about to turn 81, and Arbel Yehoud, 29, were paraded at length through a seething mob by their captors, first from the terrorists’ vehicles, then to the waiting Red Cross vehicles, in an orchestrated horror show.

Hamas gunmen ride Toyota pickup trucks through Gaza City ahead of the release of Israeli hostages on February 1, 2025 (Reuters screenshot)

This time, Hamas exercised absolute control over the handovers. The anguish revolved around the identity of those being freed, and specifically Yarden Bibas, returning not to the warm embrace of his nuclear family, but to a reality so awful that, in the words of former MK and Kibbutz Be’eri resident Haim Jelin, “the soul cannot absorb it.”

Bibas was abducted from his home on Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7, having gone out to the invading terrorists to try to somehow save his family. He was taken away to Gaza on a motorbike, bleeding from his head, while his wife Shiri, four-year-old son Ariel and baby Kfir were abducted separately from him, and held separately from him.

In November 2023, his monstrous captors told him that Shiri, Ariel and Kfir had been killed in an IDF strike — a contention the IDF denounced as cruel propaganda, and has never confirmed — and compelled him to film a video blaming the Israeli government for not arranging the return of their bodies.

Hostage Yarden Bibas, seen with a picture of his wife Shiri and young sons Ariel and Kfir, in a video he was ordered to make by his Hamas captors in Gaza, November 30, 2023.

Bibas, who was embraced Saturday by his father Eli and sister Ofri on his return, came home not knowing the fate of his wife and children, who are on the list of the 33 hostages being freed in this first phase, but who were not released in the first few days, when living children and women were supposed to have been prioritized. Earlier this week, the government was reported to have demanded information from Hamas on the status of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir; there has been no word of response from the terrorists.

Tellingly, while Israel protested Hamas’s initial failure to free Yehoud, a female civilian, earlier in the sequence, it has issued no ultimatums to Hamas as regards Shiri, Ariel and Kfir — almost as though it is preparing Yarden, his wider family and the nation as a whole for the worst. Hamas has said that eight of the 33 on the phase one list are dead, and Israel has confirmed that this information matches its own.

Thus, on Shabbat morning and into the afternoon, we watched a man prised from the jaws of hell, looking lost when required to stand and wave from the Hamas stage in Khan Younis, and then smiling a short while later during his reunion with parts of his family. And we agonized for him over what unthinkable traumas may await.

Hamas gunmen flank Israeli hostage Yarden Bibas on a stage before handing him over to a Red Cross team in Khan Yunis on February 1, 2025, as part of a hostage-ceasefire deal. (Eyad BABA / AFP)

“A quarter of our heart has returned to us,” the wider Bibas family said on Saturday afternoon. “Yarden has returned home, but the home remains incomplete… Yarden is a father who left his safe room to protect his family, bravely survived captivity, and returned to an unbearable reality.”

All of this, moreover, played out simultaneously with the rightfully joyous scenes of the other two hostages reuniting with their families: Keith Siegel meeting his wife Aviva, herself a former hostage, and the rest of his family; Ofer Calderon embracing his four ecstatic children, two of whom had also been abducted and returned in November 2023.

Released hostage Ofer Calderon reunites with his children Rotem, Gaya, Erez and Sahar on February 1, 2025. Erez and Sahar were also abducted on October 7, 2023 and were freed in November 2023. (Ma’ayon Taof / GPO)

Twelve more living hostages are meant to be freed in the coming weeks of phase one. Later this week, negotiations are supposed to begin in earnest on phase two of the accord, in which it is assessed that 24 more living hostages could be returned. The price of a phase two is the full withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza, including the Philadelphi Corridor along the Gaza-Egypt border, and a permanent cessation of hostilities.

As those negotiations get underway, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be meeting with US President Donald Trump at the White House for talks of the gravest significance. In the weeks before his return to office, and in his few short days back in power, Trump and his impressive envoy Steve Witkoff have stressed their commitment to bringing home all the hostages. They have also underlined that Hamas cannot be allowed to rise again.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (right) meets with Trump envoy Steve Witkoff in his office in Jerusalem on January 29, 2025. (Maayan Toaf/GPO)

It is not clear what Trump has in mind with his repeated insistence that Gaza needs cleaning out, and that Jordan and Egypt must take in the populace of an enclave where, as Witkoff said straightforwardly, “there is nothing left standing,” and rebuilding would take 10-15 years.

But Saturday’s ecstatic-horrific combination of events — the mixture of relief and dread as hostages and murderous terrorists went free, and as Hamas in its white trucks signaled that it will most certainly repeat October 7 if able to do so — underlined the challenge ahead.

Those twin Israeli goals of the war since October 7 — bringing home all the hostages, and ensuring that Hamas cannot leverage them to survive, revive and again threaten Israel — must both be attained. And right now, after 484 days of war, Hamas, though a massively depleted military entity, remains the only potent force in Gaza.

Armed terrorists in Sderot, southern Israel, having infiltrated from Gaza, on the morning of October 7, 2023 (X screenshot; used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law)

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