Hamas’s evil to young family

It is hard to think of anything more diabolic than the Hamas terrorists’ announcement that on Thursday they will return the remains of two of the youngest hostages seized during the October 7, 2023, massacre of Jews – Kfir Bibas, who was nine months old at the time, and his brother Ariel, who was four. Returning with the children’s remains, the terrorists say, will be those of their mother, Shiri Bibas, 32. It’s a tragic end to the hopes of husband and father Yarden Bibas, 35, a welder who was tortured unmercifully during his 484 days of captivity in Hamas tunnels and who had desperately hoped his family might still be alive.

Even by the debased standards we have come to expect from the terrorists, the fate of the Bibas family is almost incomprehensible. The family’s fate has come to symbolise what Hamas is all about and why the Jewish state is determined to annihilate the terrorist group. Hamas claims Shiri Bibas and her boys were killed in an Israeli air-raid on Gaza in November 2023. There is no evidence to support that claim. Even if it were correct, it would not excuse the terrorists’ evil in kidnapping a young mother with two small children as human shields. Neither would it justify the terrorists leaving Yarden Bibas ignorant about the fate of his wife and sons during his incarceration until he was freed on February 1.

Six more living hostages are scheduled to be handed over on Saturday, leaving what Israeli authorities believe are 73 hostages, including an uncertain number of dead, in terrorist hands. Hamas’s unrelenting inhumanity is clear for all to see. Yet the organisation believes, as senior Jerusalem Post analyst Seth Frantzman reported on Tuesday, that “it has support internationally and in various places such as among human rights NGOs that do not condemn its treatment of hostages. Hamas has gotten used to the ceasefire. Its men are enjoying the sunlight in Gaza and parading in uniforms rather than hiding in hospitals … It feels like it weathered the storm of war.”

The horrifying fate of the Bibas family and other hostages makes it imperative that Israel and the civilised world waste no time in disabusing the terrorists of such notions.