Where is the outrage for the Bibas family?

Last week was one of unbearable anguish and heartbreak for Israel and the Jewish diaspora, as the full horror of the Bibas family story came to light. Last Thursday, the beautiful Bibas boys – four-year-old Ariel and nine-month-old Kfir – were returned to Israel in coffins. They were innocent children, stolen from their beds and taken hostage on 7 October 2023. They had had their lives cut short for the ‘crime’ of being Jewish.

When the boys’ bodies were handed over by Hamas, the terrorist group claimed they had been killed by an Israeli airstrike in November 2023. Just a day later, following forensic examinations, the IDF said that this was not true. Their captors, it continued, had murdered the children ‘with their bare hands’. The two babies were consciously killed in cold blood. They were deemed fair game by Hamas in its anti-Semitic crusade against Israel.

Hamas’s cruel lies did not stop there. Hamas had initially claimed it was handing over the bodies of four hostages – Ariel, Kfir, their mother, Shiri, and 84-year-old peace activist Oded Lifschitz. The bodies of Ariel, Kfir and Oded were all confirmed. But the fourth body was not Shiri’s. Instead, Hamas had given Israel the body of an unidentified Gazan woman. On Friday, Hamas handed over a fifth body, which the IDF has since confirmed to be Shiri. Hamas claimed that she, like her sons, died in an explosion following an Israeli airstrike, but Israel says there is no forensic evidence to support this. At least Shiri’s husband, Yarden Bibi, who was also taken hostage on 7 October and released earlier this month, will now finally be able to bury his wife and sons.

For several weeks now, we have witnessed Hamas’ humiliating staged hostage handovers, with surviving hostages forced to perform for the baying crowd before they are handed over to the Red Cross. Sickeningly, Hamas continued their depraved theatrics even with dead hostages. On Thursday, we witnessed a macabre spectacle of death. Dummy coffins with pictures of the four hostages attached were displayed on a stage in front of a giant mural of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He was portrayed as some kind of vampyric demon with blood dripping from a fanged mouth – an image that evoked the ancient Jewish blood libel. Words printed beneath the image blamed ‘Netanyahu and his Nazi army’ for killing the hostages with ‘missiles from Zionist warplanes’. The audacity of this was sickening – responsibility for the deaths and suffering of all the hostages lies solely with Hamas and its army of anti-Semites.

This staged performance was only part one of Hamas’s cruel stunt. The actual coffins containing the bodies were found to be locked, with no keys provided. IDF specialists had to check the coffins and bodies for booby-traps. On opening the caskets, it was then discovered that propaganda materials from Hamas and other terrorist groups had been placed inside along with the bodies.

What did world leaders have to say about this despicable desecration of the dead? UK prime minister Keir Starmer could only muster ‘condolences’, but no condemnation. No shock or horror at Thursday’s grotesque spectacle.

On X, United Nations chief António Guterres condemned ‘the parading of bodies and displaying of the coffins of the deceased Israeli hostages by Hamas’, in a mild offering of outrage. This is sadly all we can expect from an organisation whose women’s agency took nearly two months to condemn Hamas for its brutal attack and systematic use of rape on 7 October. Not to mention its silence over the plight of the Bibas family prior to the handover.

It is this silence that is most crushing. It took 503 days for the bodies of little Ariel and Kfir to be returned home. Israel and the Jewish community thought about Shiri and those boys every single one of those days. But we should not have been the only ones.

In 2014, when Islamist militia group Boko Haram kidnapped 276 schoolgirls in Nigeria, there was a worldwide campaign to bring them home. It was a movement championed by the likes of then US first lady Michelle Obama and Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie. And rightly so. But there was no such campaign for the Bibas children.

Instead, hostage posters picturing Ariel and Kfir were ripped down in cities across the Western world. In a park in Toronto, posters of the boys were discovered with swastikas drawn on their faces. Meanwhile, at ‘pro-Palestine’ marches in London, we have witnessed people openly displaying their support for Hamas and waving placards featuring anti-Semitic imagery. On elite university campuses in the UK and the US, keffiyeh-clad students have chanted, ‘globalise the intifada’ – the same intifada that resulted in the murder of the Bibas boys.

In a photo from before Hamas’s pogrom, all four members of the Bibas family can be seen smiling in matching Batman pyjamas. In a video clip, Ariel runs down a path, a Batman cape billowing behind him. ‘He loved superheroes’, said Shiri’s cousin. In another, we see Ariel meet his baby brother for the first time. Two, pure, innocent beams of light, extinguished forever by the darkest evil.

Like millions of other Jewish mothers in the aftermath of 7 October, I couldn’t help but look at my own young children and wonder ‘What if…?’. For Yarden Bibas and the rest of that family, this nightmare is a reality they will have to live with forever. We must not forget what happened to those little boys and their mother – or the monsters who did it.

The entire Western world needs to take a long hard look in the mirror. Kfir, Ariel and Shiri will be staring back.

Naomi Firsht is a writer and co-author of The Parisians’ Guide to Cafés, Bars and Restaurants. Follow her on Twitter: @Naomi_theFirsht