Hamas pulled trigger but world loaded the gun

The Bibas family deaths have turned the mirror on the West and the reflection has shown moral cowardice, an anti-Israel obsession that defies explanation.

A Hamas fighter at the handing over of Israeli hostages’ bodies, including Ariel and Kfir. Picture: Eyad Baba/AFP

Ariel and Kfir Bibas were brutally murdered about a month after they were taken as hostages in October 2023.

Kfir, a tiny redheaded infant just nine months old, and his four-year-old brother, Ariel, were last seen clinging to their traumatised mother, Shiri, 32, as Gazan civilians dragged them out of their home and into hell that soft Saturday morning 16 months ago.

They were chosen because they were Jewish. Stolen from their home and murdered for no other reason than they were Jewish children.

We now know when they were killed because their remains were sent to Israel this week, in tiny coffins that formed part of a grotesque, subhuman pantomime played out in northern Khan Younis. Crowds of Gazans flocked to watch. They brought their children as if it were a local fair or market day. They brought children to cheer over the corpses of murdered Jewish babies.

What kind of culture is this, what kind of evil?

We know that Ariel and Kfir were killed in November 2023 because of the forensic examination that took place when their little bodies were returned. And because science doesn’t lie, we also know the unthinkable.

The coffin marked with Shiri Bibas’s name, bearing her image, contained instead the remains of an unknown person.

DNA testing proved it was not her, nor any other of the hostages yet to be returned.

When you think these black-hearted terrorists have plumbed the depths of human depravity, they prove you wrong. They go deeper. Another level of evil. Another level of cruelty.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised when I saw the alert on my phone breaking this news, even in a week in which the confirmation of the Bibas family’s murder had felt like an earthquake. Part of me had struggled to understand why we’re shocked by an outcome that seemed inevitable, if unthinkable.

Perhaps it’s because even in the face of all we know – the rape, mutilation, executions and slaughter – in the face of all that Hamas and its civilian foot soldiers in Gaza have done, broadcast, boasted about and gloried in, part of our humanity thought, surely, not. Surely killing a young mother and her babies is a line even they won’t cross.

The kidnapping of Shiri Bibas and her children on October 7, 2023.

There is no such line for them. They are fuelled by hatred and bloodlust.

I find myself in unfamiliar territory as I write. There is something about not just the facts at play but about the reporting of these children’s murders that has cauterised my heart.

Phrases like “killed in captivity”; “died as hostages”. It doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel fair. These vanilla words feel like dishonour. I can understand maybe there’s a desire to be respectful, but this isn’t the time to tread softly.

Shiri, Kfir and Ariel Bibas were murdered. Yes, Hamas pulled the trigger, but the world loaded that gun. The UN hand-delivered the bullets. Governments of Western democracies the world over, including our own, provided the cover needed for the crime. They are all guilty of the ultimate, unforgivable sin of omission.

The Bibas family was killed in captivity. Words like this offer anaesthetic under the guise of politeness. I say, no.

To everyone who stayed silent. To every person who threw about words like evil and genocide. To every person who justified October 7 and continues to. To our own government, which told Israel to lay off and which has spent more time cheering Palestinian statehood than it did demanding the freedom of a young mother and her babies. Consider these words unshielded by soft language.

Ariel Bibas, 4, and his brother Kfir, 1.

Did those babies die in their mother’s arms? Were they alone. Did Kfir get taken from Shiri? What about Ariel? Was their mother able to comfort them in death? How long did they suffer at the hands of those demons? Were these little children killed together or one at a time?

I dare you to keep reading. These questions define and expose the shameful moral pallor of Western governments in relation to Israel and the Jewish nation.

Was Shiri Bibas kept by civilians, like so many other hostages? Did she plead for her life as it was taken from her? If I close my eyes, I imagine her begging for her children to be freed. Did she die first or did the children? When it happened, was there an audience or were they deep underground in one of the Western taxpayer-funded terror tunnels that became modern-day iterations of the Holocaust?

Did they taunt her, as they did Yarden Bibas, Shiri’s husband, now freed, widowed and plunged into hell yet again? When he was kept in a cage underground, Yarden was told that Shiri and the children were alive in Tel Aviv. Did they lie to her, too, before they murdered her?

These words are not designed for sensation. I write them so as not to allow their murders to be sanitised or reduced to a headline.

Hamas has already said Shiri, Ariel and Kfir were killed in an Israeli strike. To Hamas I say: burn in hell.

Daniella Gilboa in a Hamas propaganda video in July 2024.

Let me remind you that in November last year Hamas released a video of hostage Daniella Gilboa covered in dust and rubble and announced to the world that she had been killed in an Israeli airstrike.

The caption read “one of the enemy’s female prisoners was killed in an area that is under Zionist aggression in the northern Gaza Strip”. Theirs are the scribblings of insanity.

They didn’t name her but Daniella’s distinct tattoos were visible through the dust. She is of course alive, released a few weeks ago, and she has testified to the day that video was filmed. She thought she was about to be killed and begged for her life. Instead, she was used as a tool of psychological warfare.

The depth of evil it takes to do these things. The depth of emptiness, delusion it takes to defend or deny them. The depth of stupidity to think that, given half the chance, Hamas and its allies wouldn’t do the same thing here in Australia or in any other Western democracy.

And the depth of recklessness for the Albanese government to bring 3000 Gazans into Australia on tourist visas.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Anthony Albanese, along with other world leaders, could have demanded mercy for Shiri Bibas and her children. They could have specifically, deliber­ately and without resiling, demanded the family’s immediate release.

In so many ways their lives and their deaths have turned the mirror on the West, on governments (overwhelmingly of the political left), and the reflection has shown moral cowardice, an anti-Israel obsession that defies explanation.

Hersh Goldberg-Polin was among the thousands of young people attacked by Gazan terrorists at the Nova Music Festival. Picture: AFP

If Hamas could have wiped out the Jewish race on October 7, it would have. It had been planned to make it all the way to Jerusalem. Haven’t you read this yet? None of this information is contested or difficult to find, yet it is rarely talked about.

Of course, never mentioned by our own government in its myriad posturing on the conflict. In its myopic focus on granting statehood to Palestinians. It says Hamas can’t play a part. How quaint. Does it think Hamas is informed by the views of Wong? That it will simply comply and disarm?

When someone dies, it’s customary for Jews to say: may their memory be a blessing. At the funeral of American-Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was executed along with five others in 2024, his father Jon Polin spoke words that it feels right to repeat now.

Shiri, Kfir and Ariel. May your memories be a revolution.