The worst news of all
Fear for Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas turns to dread
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).
This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.
We have worried desperately for Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas from the moment of their kidnapping by Hamas-led terrorists at Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7, 2023. Anyone who has seen the video of Shiri, helpless, caught in a situation beyond the darkest nightmare, holding onto her small, red-haired sons for dear life, surrounded by a mob of shouting gunmen, in the last moments before they were abducted to Gaza, has it indelibly printed on their psyche. So, too, the sight of husband and father Yarden Bibas, abducted separately, bleeding from head wounds on a motorbike surrounded by terrorists en route to Gaza. And the knowledge that Shiri’s parents, Margit Silberman Shnaider and Yosi Silberman, were murdered in the kibbutz that morning.
We have feared especially obsessively for Shiri and her small sons since, alone among the kidnapped mothers and children, they were not released in the weeklong truce of November 2023. Still more so when Hamas, at the end of that month, claimed that they had been killed in an Israeli airstrike, and released a video of Yarden, tearful, having been told about their ostensible deaths.
Exactly a year ago, the IDF published another video, of what it said was recently recovered footage of Shiri and the boys being moved around in Khan Younis on the day of their abduction. Now we knew that they had been brought into Gaza alive. But any fresh optimism this may have engendered was shattered by the IDF spokesman’s accompanying announcement that other “scraps of information” had left the IDF “very concerned for the fate of Shiri and the children.”
The deep fears have turned to dread since the start of the current hostage-ceasefire deal, whose protocols required the release, initially, of children and female civilians. Shiri, Ariel and Kfir were not in the first group to go free, or the second, or the third… by which time Hamas had started to include men among those coming out.
The fact that Israel objected when Arbel Yahoud, a female civilian, was not released before female soldiers — and ensured that she was freed days later — but made no comparable objection over Hamas’s failure to free Shiri, Ariel and Kfir, spoke volumes: Official Israel apparently knew the worst, but wasn’t saying it.
Many of us whose job involves learning, understanding and conveying information to the public haven’t always quite known how to relate to the question of the fate of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir. What to write each week about their glaring omission from the lists of those scheduled to be freed?
Some members of the wider family protested, early in the current deal, that Israeli media was not highlighting their fate. But it was hard to know whether it would be useful or calamitous, potentially damaging in ways we did not know, to state the apparently obvious: that they should and presumably would have been freed, in November 2023 and, if not, in January 2025, if they were alive.
There was always the faintest sliver of hope: Since the IDF had indicated a year ago that Shiri, Ariel and Kfir were held not by Hamas, but by an allied terrorist group, the Mujahadeen Brigades, they might just possibly be off the grid and beyond Hamas’s reach, somewhere in Gaza, somehow surviving.
When Yarden was released on February 1, his family reported that he was clinging to hope for his wife and sons. “Yarden asks about them and I have no answers for him,” his sister Ofri said on February 3. In his first public statement, on February 7, he said: “Sadly, my family hasn’t returned to me yet. They are still there. My light is still there, and as long as they’re there, everything here is dark.” Said Ofri on February 10: “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 then, on Tuesday, came the news that Hamas had named three of four bodies it says it is to return to Israel on Thursday: Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas.
While the families of the final six known living hostages, now set to be freed on Saturday, were informed Tuesday by the Israel authorities that their loved ones are coming back, the Bibas relatives, as of Tuesday night, had been given no official word.
Evidently, official Israel can still not provide the certainty that the family at once needs and dreads. If it is to be the most terrible news of all, Yarden and the wider family must wait a little longer to hear it.
The family said Tuesday night it was “in turmoil” after Hamas’s announcement. But “until we receive definitive confirmation,” it added in a statement, “our journey is not over.”
That journey may well now finally end on Thursday — with a confirmation both predictable and shattering. Three pure souls in a sea of tragedy, three lives among so many torn viciously from normalcy, whose fate has shaken us all.
