World waits to hear fate of little Kfir, Israel’s youngest hostage
Kfir Bibas was just 262 days old when the gorillas of Gaza called. If he has been kept alive by these black-hearted Arabs, then God help him. If he has been murdered by Gazans, then God help them.
Jew-killing sadist Yahya Sinwar always looked and sounded like a compromise between a man and a corpse. His Hamas boss, Ismail Haniyeh, told last year that his sons had been killed in the war in Gaza, unemotionally announced that “Through the blood of the martyrs and the pain of the injured, we create hope”.
That’s one way of looking at it.
Savagery is not inherited – it is taught. And it has been taught to far too many Gazans for far too long, assisted by the corrupt and malicious United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.
Only that can begin to explain why little Kfir Bibas remains kidnapped.
451 days in captivity
On Saturday he turns two. He was nine months old and beginning to crawl when Gazan terrorists raided his home in the blighted Nir Oz kibbutz, the fields of which abut southern Gaza. Gazan Arabs had helped work the fields there. Perhaps they had been too trusted. The killer raiders certainly knew where to go on October 7, 2023, sometimes murdering the people who had done most to help them.
The raiders grabbed Kfir, his elder brother Ariel, 4, mum Shiri, 32, and his dad Yarden, 34. They boastfully caught it all on their Go-Pro cameras. The world saw a panicked Shiri protectively holding her children as the wildly shouting and shooting young thugs herded them together. Shiri’s parents were murdered along with a quarter of the town’s population.
Kfir was just 262 days old when the gorillas of Gaza called. If they have not killed him, he has spent 451 days in captivity. Literally. Some released hostages said they saw his dad in a cage underneath the Gaza city of Khan Yunis, just a few kilometres from Kfir’s home.
The fate of Kfir may well decide the fate of all Gazans. The world is watching what happens to the youngest hostage. If he has been kept alive by these black-hearted Arabs, then God help him. If he has been murdered by Gazans, then God help them. President Donald Trump will have a thorough briefing on the Bibas family when he swings his legs under the Resolute desk in the Oval Office again on Monday.
Both Sinwar and Haniyeh could easily have secured the baby’s safety. They chose not to. They planned and rehearsed, over several years, those October 7 raids in which 1200 innocents were hacked to death, blown up, shot and burned alive, while 240 were kidnapped; not all for being Jewish, but for working and living in mostly Jewish lands.
A one-way street
Israel is a vibrant democracy of Jews, Arabs and Christians, Baháʼí and others. In Israel, Arabs are in senior positions in the army and police forces. There are 10 Arab Israelis in its parliament, the Knesset. The Israeli acceptance of their historical enemies is extraordinary. But it is too often a one-way street.
On Gazan streets, Jews are dead meat. Who can forget the scenes where Gazans citizens spat at the partially clothed body of Shani Louk, a 22-year-old German-Jewish tattoo artist, who had been bashed to death at the Nova music festival.
The world was revolted by the scenes of celebrating young Arabs parading her body through city streets on the back of a truck shouting “Alluha Akbar” (God is great). They later used her credit card to steal funds and perhaps to make out she was alive. The German government, urged on by Louk’s distraught family, tried to set up negotiations to secure her return. The Israeli Defence Forces soon found skull fragments belonging to her at the Nova site. Her injuries there had not been survivable.
And there is so much more that condemns Gazans, not just its Hamas-trained terrorists.
They voted in Haniyeh and Hamas who set about building things. Not building up, like industrious Singapore, but building down – more than 500km of tunnels so they could live like rats while planning the mass murder of their industrious neighbours busy next door turning granite into green.
If only the Gazans had put that effort into a proper sewer system for their towns. They poured an estimated 725,000 tonnes of concrete into the tunnel system known as the Metro or Lower Gaza. To put that into perspective, there are 113,000 tonnes of concrete in New York’s Empire State Building.
For years the greatest health challenge for Gazans, and the greatest source of illness for its children who make up half the 2.3 million population of the territory, has been a lack of potable water. In Gaza, waste water rises from underground and untreated sewage is pumped straight into the Mediterranean. For years this has led to life-threatening outbreaks of acute diarrhoea and meningitis.
But Hamas didn’t dig to connect sewer pipes, they dug tunnels for a war they planned. Hamas has been spending more than $1 million a month on the tunnels; imagine what an investment like that could have done for the health and wellbeing of “its” people. Since being elected, Hamas, on behalf of those who elected it, “invested” more than $200m in tunnelling.
It cannot be that most Gazans were unaware of these under their homes and businesses, or oblivious as entrances to the tunnels system were built in hospitals, nurseries, schools and even in children’s bedrooms.
Some outsiders still dismiss the suggestion that Hamas built various headquarters underneath the hospitals treating thousands of people upstairs for illnesses they had willingly failed to prevent. It is hard for the Western mind to grasp such a misanthropic strategy.
But it was robustly confirmed by several captured Hamas operatives, including Anas Muhammad Faiz Al-Sharif, who was arrested recently at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza’s north. Aged 21, he said he had joined Hamas in 2022 and worked as a cleaning supervisor in the building.
He was interrogated by Israel’s internal security service, Shin Bet.
Who else was at (Kamal Adwan Hospital)?
“The staff. The medical team I work with daily and directly. There were also operatives from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, from the Al-Nasser Division (a Hamas-aligned group of kidnappers and killers) and other organisations in northern Gaza.”
“Inside the hospital, they distribute the grenades and mortars equipment for attacking tanks, for ambush positions, and for tunnels underground…â€
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) January 7, 2025
🎥This is part of the interrogation of Anas Muhammad Faiz Al-Sharif, a Hamas terrorist apprehended during our precise operational… pic.twitter.com/GCIuOJ2noU
Why were you hiding in the Kamal Adwan Hospital?
“They believe it is a safe haven for them because the military cannot directly target it … because there civilians and patents there.”
He added that the terrorists’ thinking was that Israel could not bomb the hospital or demolish it. He is right. When the IDF arrived there they evacuated the building while searching for Al-Sharif and his venomous colleagues.
Al-Sharif was asked what these men were doing there.
“The operatives were there transporting and weapons like AK47s … and pistols. The weapons were transferred to and from the hospital, from the outside in and from the inside out within the hospital.”
He also said the hospital was a base for observation and patrols: “They leave the hospital late at night. They arrived at the hospital in the morning.”
Al-Sharif explained these movements in greater detail: “Inside the hospital they distribute the grenades and mortar equipment for attacking tanks, for ambush positions and for tunnels underground”.
When the IDF first entered the Kamal Adwan Hospital, Israel was absurdly accused of needlessly and viciously attacking patients, doctors and administrators, and even digging up the dead to crush their remains with bulldozers. Earlier, when a bomb killed perhaps 100 Palestinians (Hamas immediately reported that it was 500, and mostly women and children) at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in northern Gaza, it was reported breathlessly by ever-reliable anti-Semitic news outlets, including the BBC and, of course, Al-Jazeera, that it was likely an Israeli missile. Al-Jazeera added that “Israel’s response to the hospital bombing – a war crime under international law – is consistent with its usual post-atrocity routine”. It was proved to be an Islamic Jihad missile that misfired; you just cannot rely on those bombs knocked up in the backyard.
And you cannot rely on regular reports of genocide in Gaza: its population has rocketed since Israel departed in 2005 and 180 babies are born there each day, according to the UN. Nor is Israel using starvation as a tool, despite the insistent claims by Human Rights Watch, the Sydney Morning Herald. The Guardian and the UN: Israeli legal scholar Eugene Kontorovich estimates that more calories are delivered to Gazans today than they consumed before the war. A recent report established that an average 3163 calories of food was being delivered per person daily, much more than the 2100 calories that is accepted as the minimum food required in a crisis. The British National Health Service states that the average man needs 2500 calories a day.
No one with an ounce of humanity can be other than horrified by the death toll and destruction in that strip of land.
What really happened on October 7
So what happened on October 7, 2023? Haniyeh and Sinwar’s plans went like clockwork. The Israelis’ defence forces were caught flat-footed despite mounting evidence that an significant attack loomed. More Jews were killed in a single day than since Hitler was alive.
Israel counterattacked after summoning its forces made up mostly of reservists – men and women working as teachers, or in fields and offices who had served compulsory military service. They do so for just such a moment. Arab neighbours have attacked the little nation relentlessly since it was founded in 1948.
Gazans in 2006 elected Hamas to run their affairs fully in the knowledge that the Hamas charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the murder of all Jews. Haniyeh coined the phrase “from the river to the sea” which, depressingly, is chanted mindlessly by uneducated university students on campuses across Australia.
Of course, Haniyeh and Sinwar are dead. Haniyeh was assassinated in a bold manoeuvre, blown up in his bed last July in the heart of the Iranian capital, Tehran, while there to attend the inauguration of Iran’s new president and being protected by the “elite” Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Iran funds and arms most of Irsael’s enemies including Hamas, Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and the Houthi rebels attacking international shipping off Yemen. Sinwar was killed months later in sordid circumstances while running from the IDF. He had on him an UNWRA identification card and the equivalent of almost $20,000 in cash, perhaps to secure his safety in a third country. Haniyeh and Sinwar never spent a shekel that had not been earned by someone else.
But plenty of Gazans were involved that day and not all of them were uniformed. About 6000 young fighters breached the Gaza fence at 119 locations and attacked the southern Israeli villages and the music festival. They arrived after more than 4300 rockets – fired by an estimated 1000 Gazans – had been fired into Israel. The attack was on the Sabbath because Sinwar probably banked on observant Jews having their mobile phones switched off for the day and so unable to warn others of the first incursions.
Much of what happened next is unpublishable. Many young women were raped – so violently some had broken pelvises – and after shooting them dead, the Hamas gunmen often crushed and disfigured their faces. At the hospitals to which their bodies were taken victims were first identified by their possessions or jewellery.
The Bibas family had been discussing leaving Nir Oz for somewhere away from the endless rockets from Gaza. At home that morning they heard the sirens. But no need to panic, that was common. They heard the thud of rockets landing and then the rat-tat-tat of gunfire. Dad Yarden texted his sister to tell her that attackers had entered the kibbutz. His next text read simply “I love you”. Moment later another stated “They’re in”. Meanwhile, down the road, other terrorists were setting fire to the home of Shiri’s parents, Margit and Yossi Silberman. They were burned alive.
The terrorists’ own cameras caught them drilling open the Bibas family’s secure door and then the look of dread on Shiri’s face as she sought to keep together and alive her kids Ariel and the baby Kfir. They also film the bloodied Yarden, One attacker had him by the throat as he held a hammer in his other hand.
After the killings, the kidnappers returned with their human bounty. Sinwar knew he would need human bargaining chips when Hamas inevitably lost the war he had purposely provoked.
When Hamas fighters left, another wave of Gazans arrived: looters. Reportedly thousands of them – men, women and even children. They stole bikes, household and electrical goods and baby clothes, presumably sometimes stepping around bodies to do so. They ate ice cream from the victims’ fridges. They stole cars to drive their booty back to Gaza. They took the Silbermans’ phones and when, later, these were switched on and pinged in Gaza there was hope they too had been kidnapped.
Israel’s soldiers have been finding some of the stolen property in houses in Gaza.
But they have not found Yarden or his family. Their fate remains unknown.
There are an estimated 98 Israeli hostages in Gaza.
Nili Margalit, a 41-year-old nurse also kidnapped from Nir Oz, met Yarden in a tunnel. He had been separated from his wife and children. At one point a Hamas boss told Margalit, who speaks basic Arabic, to tell the imprisoned man that his family had been killed in an Israeli air strike. She refused, believing it was probably another effort at psychological torture. She was released soon after.
The oldest hostage also came from Nir Oz. Arye Zalmanovich, 86, who helped establish the kibbutz in 1955 died soon after in Gaza, his son believing he was murdered.
Meanwhile, thousands of noisy philistines attend weekly “free Palestine” rallies in Australian cities and across the capitals of the West.
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