From the Liveblog of
Monday, February 10, 2025
Freed hostage Yarden Bibas is ‘clinging to hope’ for his wife and young sons, his sister says
Yarden Bibas, who was released by Hamas on February 1, after almost 16 months in captivity, is clinging to hope that his wife Shiri and young sons, Ariel and Kfir, are still alive, his sister Ofri says.
In an interview on Channel 12 news, she confirms that Yarden’s Hamas captors initially lied to him and told him that his family was safe in Tel Aviv, and says “he believed them.” And she notes that, at the end of November 2023, they told him, and publicly announced, that the three were dead — a claim Israel has not confirmed.
But he came out of Gaza “with an understanding very similar to ours,” Ofri says. “That is: he understands that there is fear — fear for their lives, but he knows that there is no certainty, and he holds onto the hope. And we’ve held onto [that hope] for 15 months and we continue to hold onto it, and continue to expect them and to wait for them here at home.”
Nonetheless, she also says, “He needs the certainty. We all do. To close the circle. We are asking for that from a place where we are still clinging to hope. We’re not giving up hope for a second, especially now he’s here with us. But yes, we want them home.”
Speaking soon after Hamas announced that it was delaying Saturday’s scheduled release of hostages until further notice, she says, “What’s happening now is very scary — there are a lot of fears about this stage. And certainly that the next stage comes to fruition.”
Asked whether Yarden is aware that his wife and sons have become a kind of symbol of the cruelty of the terrorists, she says, “He is starting to understand it. He understands that he’s no longer anonymous, and that there is a lot of interest in the family. That’s not easy for him to deal with. An anonymous man realizing that pictures [of him and his family] are all over the world and that everyone knows the family.”
She says that while Yarden is starting to speak a little louder and emerge from himself, and has retained his sense of humor, “there’s a lot of anger. A lot of questions about where was the army.”
His anger is, first of all, “directed at Hamas, of course,” but also, “he asked a lot, where was the army? How can it be that there was nobody” who came to the rescue on October 7? (Bibas was kidnapped separately from Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir, when Hamas terrorists raided their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz, after he left their safe room hoping to distract the gunmen and save his family.)
“It’s still hard for me to believe that he’s here,” says Ofri. “But we are missing Shiri and the boys. I so want this deal to be completed. This framework was so complicated from the start. And we see that it can blow up at every second.”
She concludes: “I hope that, if there is some kind of misunderstanding, they utilize it to improve the terms of the deal, shorten the timetable, and advance phase two… We don’t need to be exposed to more shocking testimonies and more hostages coming home [in the conditions] they did [in recent days]. We know they are going through hell there. They all need to be at home. This cannot be strung out any longer.”
