Fears for Israel’s youngest hostage as Hamas releases father

They became a potent symbol of Israel’s hostage crisis after video from the Hamas-led 2023 attack showed Palestinian militants leading away a distraught mother clutching her two small red-haired sons.

Another video showed the father of the same family being spirited away to the Gaza Strip on a motorcycle, his head bloodied.

A protester holds a sign with a picture of the kidnapped Bibas family during a demonstration in Tel Aviv in December.Credit: Getty Images

On Friday, Hamas said the father, Yarden Bibas, 35, would be one of three male hostages to be freed, handing him over to the Red Cross in Khan Younis on Saturday evening (AEDT), before he was transferred to the Israeli military.

Israelis are still anxiously awaiting word of his wife, Shiri, and their two children, Ariel, now 5, and Kfir, who was nine months old at the time of his capture – the youngest hostage taken into Gaza.

Last week, Daniel Hagari, an Israeli military spokesperson, seemed to brace the public for the likelihood that they would not come out alive, saying the military was “gravely concerned” for the mother and children.

Hamas claimed last year that Bibas and her children had been killed by an Israeli airstrike, but Israeli officials have never confirmed that.

Kfir Bibas, at nine months, was the youngest hostage taken by Hamas on October 7, 2023.Credit: AP

Several hostages were killed in Gaza by Israeli forces, accidentally shot or possibly as the result of Israeli airstrikes. The military has also said some civilian hostages may have been killed by Israeli forces as they were being kidnapped on the day of the October 7 attack.

The Bibas family has been through “a twisted reality from hell,” relative Yifat Zailer said in an interview last year.

The family of four were among more than 180 residents of kibbutz Nir Oz, a farming community in southern Israel, who were killed or abducted in the October 7 attack. Since then, the family became the faces of a national trauma that sparked a fierce Israeli war in Gaza aimed at eradicating Hamas.

Throughout more than a year of waiting, hostage families and their supporters have carried orange balloons and worn orange shirts in honour of the missing children and their ginger-coloured hair. They have held large events to mark the first two birthdays of Kfir, who has never celebrated one out of captivity.

Demonstrators hold orange balloons at a Tel Aviv rally in solidarity with the Bibas family, taken hostage by Hamas.Credit: AP

All other children seized in the October 7 attack were released in a previous ceasefire deal.

Israeli officials pressed Hamas negotiators in recent days for more clarity on Bibas and her children, according to Israeli media. As a female civilian with children, they were expected to be released in the initial stages of the ceasefire deal, before soldiers or men, if they were alive.

Yarden Bibas was abducted separately from his family.

In the early morning hours before his capture, he texted his sister, Ofri Bibas-Levy, to tell her about incoming rocket fire, according to an interview she gave to Kan, the Israeli public broadcaster. Later, he texted her that militants had entered the camp. He had a gun, he told her, but the militants had automatic rifles.

Ofri Bibas Levy, sister of Yarden Bibas, speaks to the media in November 2023.Credit: AP

He then described scenes of clashes on the kibbutz and his fear that his two young sons would not be able to keep quiet.

“It feels like the end,” he wrote to her at 9.10 in the morning.

Video from the October 7 attack on Nir Oz revealed images of militants drilling open the Bibas family’s front door.

Sometime before her brother was captured, Bibas-Levy told Kan, he texted her and their parents that he loved them. At 9.45 in the morning, he wrote: “They’re in.”

Bibas-Levy told Kan that the first she learnt of her brother’s October 7 kidnapping was when she saw a video of militants abducting him a few days later.

In November 2023, not long after Hamas said Shiri Bibas and her children were killed by Israeli bombing, the group released a video of Yarden Bibas being told his wife and children had been killed, as he broke down crying.

Images of the Bibas family have been seared into the Israeli psyche throughout the crisis. They were on the front page of one of the country’s most popular daily newspapers, Yedioth Ahronoth, under the headline “A mother and two small souls, led into the darkness”.

And across the country, graffiti depicting the family has appeared on the streets. Some show baby Kfir holding a pink elephant, as in the photo used for his hostage poster. Others show an imagined reunion of the Bibas family, lighting a Hanukkah menorah.

“I know they became a symbol,” Bibas-Levy said in a tearful news conference last February. “But for us, it’s our family, and we want them back.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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