Herzog asks forgiveness, coalition MKs invoke Amalek as slain hostages handed over

President Isaac Herzog asked for forgiveness from four slain Israeli hostages on Thursday, after their bodies were believed to be returned to Israel under the terms of the ceasefire and hostage release deal, while other Israeli leaders reacted with a mix of sorrow and anger.

“Agony. Pain. There are no words,” Herzog said on X. “Our hearts — the hearts of an entire nation — lie in tatters.”

“On behalf of the State of Israel, I bow my head and ask for forgiveness,” he wrote, after Israel received four coffins, said by Hamas to contain the bodies of Shiri Bibas, her two young sons Ariel and Kfir, and Oded Lifshitz.

“Forgiveness for not protecting you on that terrible day. Forgiveness for not bringing you home safely,” the president wrote. “May their memory be a blessing.”

(Update: The IDF said early Friday morning that while the bodies of Lifshitz, Ariel Bibas and Kfir Bibas were indeed returned, the fourth body was not Shiri Bibas.)

There was no immediate comment from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose office had said on Wednesday that “in this difficult time, our hearts are with the grieving families.”

The coffins said to contain the remains of the four hostages were brought to Israel in an IDF convoy at midday on Thursday, and were then taken to the Abu Kabir National Center of Forensic Medicine for identification, a process that Health Ministry officials said could take up to 48 hours.

The Bibas family requested on Wednesday that the public “refrain from eulogizing our loved ones until there is confirmation following final identification.”

Israeli lawmakers by and large respected the request and avoided definitively declaring the identities of the slain hostages, or in some instances appeared to be holding off on making any statement until the bodies had been identified.

Some right-wing lawmakers, meanwhile, issued statements attacking Hamas and Palestinians in the hours following the arrival of the caskets in Israel.

Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli declared that “a society that cultivates a culture of murder and death has no right to exist.”

Otzma Yehudit chairman Itamar Ben Gvir, apparently paraphrasing US President Donald Trump, said Hamas to “the gates of hell,” and urged the public to “remember these moments.”

“The sadness over the shedding of innocent blood. The jubilation of the beasts of prey. The thirst for blood. The clear knowledge that these Nazis must not continue to live,” wrote the ultranationalist minister. “Our historic duty to our children is not to give up.”

The far-right lawmaker, who resigned from the government in protest of the ceasefire deal with Hamas, reiterated his oft-repeated sentiment that “the Nazis deserve no humanitarian aid. No fuel. No electricity. No caravans. No bulldozers. No ceasefire, no withdrawal. Only the gates of hell!”

Former heritage minister Amichay Eliyahu, a member of Otzma Yehudit, quoted in a post on X a biblical verse calling for the Israelites to “blot out the memory of Amalek (their biblical enemy) from under the heavens.”

Likud MK Avichay Buaron also compared those responsible for the murder of the hostages to Amalek, which the Bible commanded the ancient Israelites to exterminate.

“Only a neo-Nazi-Shiite ideology of systematic murder of Jews, based on a brutal and sadistic culture, can give rise to such animalistic barbarity,” he wrote on X, charging that “if they could, they would murder us all and rape all our daughters.”

“This is the very nature of Amalek. His purpose. His whole essence, to hunt down the Jews and kill and destroy them,” he said.

Officials’ references to the Amalekites were cited as part of South Africa’s charge of genocide against Israel in the International Court of Justice, heard last year in The Hague. At the time, the Prime Minister’s Office hit out at the allegation that comments by Netanyahu referencing the Amalekites, the biblical enemy of the ancient Israelites, were incitement to genocide, calling the claim “false and preposterous.”

Religious Zionism MK Ohad Tal compared Gaza to the Biblical city of Sodom, stating that a mother and her two children had been murdered “and no one there in Gaza protested, no one in this Sodom condemned, no one tried to save them.”

“A collective of murder, and there is no righteous person in Sodom,” he wrote, also citing the Biblical verse on destroying the enemies of the Jewish people.

Meanwhile, Yair Golan, who chairs the Democrats party — a center-left alliance of the Labor and Meretz parties — slammed Netanyahu, accusing him of saving his political career at the expense of the hostages.

“Again we see how vile and murderous Hamas is, when it turns babies murdered in captivity into a victory ceremony,” said Golan of the terror group’s grotesque staging of the handover. “We see it and are outraged that it could and should have looked different.”

“Netanyahu keeps Hamas in power and even, despite everything, continues to strengthen it,” Golan claimed. “He is still abandoning, still leaving behind the hostages who are barely breathing. They die and he saves himself. Every moment that passes that they are not here is a crime.”

Lawmakers also made the decision on Thursday to halt the proceedings of two Knesset committees as a sign of respect for the families of the slain hostages.

In the Knesset Finance, Internal Affairs and Environment Committee, chairman Yaakov Asher, of United Torah Judaism, said he was halting the committee’s discussion, as “we are all facing a difficult day to digest as the people of Israel, as Jews, and as human beings.”

Following the cruel killing of the elderly and infants, “the only consolation is that they were returned to the Holy Land,” he said. “We share in the mourning of the families. We had hoped that they would survive, and to our great regret, that was not the case.

MK Yitzhak Pindrus, also of UTJ, followed suit not long after, and agreed to the request of opposition lawmakers to halt a meeting of the Knesset Finance Committee, which he was chairing in place of Moshe Gafni.

“On this difficult day, we are all with the families and the hostages,” he said.

‘Unfathomable pain’

Unlike Israeli lawmakers, several international diplomats mentioned Lifshitz and the Bibas family by name before the IDF convoy had even reached the Abu Kabir institute.

The murder of the four hostages and the return of their bodies to Israel was “a solemn reminder of Hamas’s unimaginable cruelty,” the top US diplomat to Jerusalem said.

“My heart is heavy knowing the remains of four deceased Israeli hostages — including sweet baby Kfir and darling Ariel — have finally returned home,” wrote interim chargés d’affaires Stephanie Hallett. “We won’t rest until all the hostages come home,” she pledged.

My heart is heavy knowing the remains of four deceased Israeli hostages — including sweet baby Kfir and darling Ariel — have finally returned home. May their memories be a blessing.

Today is a solemn reminder of Hamas’s unimaginable cruelty. We won’t rest until all the…

— Chargé d’Affaires ad interim Stephanie Hallett (@USAmbIsrael) February 20, 2025

Condolences flooded in from abroad too, and Argentinian media reported that President Javier Milei would declare a national day of mourning for the Bibas family, who held dual Israeli-Argentinian citizenship.

An Argentinian official told The Times of Israel that Milei would wait until official information is released about the identities of the slain hostages before making any decision, as requested by the Bibas family.

Calling it a “dark day,” the British Embassy in Israel said that it shared in Israel’s heartbreak.

“It’s a stark reminder of the horrors Hamas inflicted on innocent people on 7/10,” the embassy wrote on X. “For over 500 days we hoped for the safe return of all the hostages. This hope is broken, but we mustn’t give up on those still held hostage in Gaza.”

Lifshitz’s daughter Sharone is a UK-Israeli citizen, who was living in the UK at the time of the October 7 assault.

Freidrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union and frontrunner for chancellor, mourned in a post on X that “503 days of hope ended in unfathomable pain” for the Bibas and Lifshitz families, while the ambassador for the European Union to Israel, Dimiter Tzantchev, said that “no child, no family should endure such tragedy.” Both men called for the release of the remaining hostages.

Sixty-six of the 251 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza, including the bodies of at least 35 confirmed dead by the IDF. Six living hostages are expected to be released on Saturday.

In addition to the four bodies returned Thursday, Hamas has so far released 24 living hostages — 14 Israeli civilians, five soldiers, and five Thai nationals — during a ceasefire that began in January. The terror group freed 105 civilians during a weeklong truce in late November 2023, and four hostages were released before that.

Eight hostages have been rescued by troops alive, and the bodies of 40 hostages have also been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the Israeli military as they tried to escape their captors.

Hamas is also holding two Israeli civilians who entered the Strip in 2014 and 2015, as well as the body of an IDF soldier who was killed in 2014.