Today Hamas returned the bodies of the Shiri Bibas and her baby and toddler, and of elderly Oded Lifshitz. We really didn’t need more evidence of the ghoulish nature of this entire society, but we got it nevertheless. When we say that Gazan society is a death cult, believe it.
Plenty of people have written about what happened today. I’ll just take an excerpt from one of those pieces entitled “BEYOND BARBARISM: Hamas Parades the Bodies of Dead Israeli Babies While Palestinians Celebrate”:
In a dusty plain outside the ruined city of Khan Younis, Hamas put on a show. The stars of this show were the caskets containing the dead bodies of four Israelis, including 32-year-old Shiri Bibas and her two young children, Ariel and Kfir.
Kfir was nine months old. …
In another example of Hamas’s courage and fortitude, the body of 84-year-old Oded Lifshitz was also part of the Hamas extravaganza. …
The coffins carrying the dead Israelis were placed on the stage, each with a picture and the text “date of arrest: 7 October 2023.” …
“Date of arrest”? Goebbels is smiling in his grave.
Hundreds of Palestinian civilians were on hand to cheer the spectacle as spritely martial music played in the background. …
The Red Cross never visited any of the hostage families or the hostages themselves for the entire time they were held. But they were on hand to participate in the Hamas spectacle.
Is any of this surprising? I don’t think so. And of course there was the claim – as though it matters in terms of culpability – that Israeli bombs killed them. Perhaps that’s even true; there’s no way to know at this point, but taking anything the Palestinians say at face value is a bad idea. And of course, even if they died that way, Gazans are at fault. In the case of Shiri Bibas, Kfir, and Ariel, they were actually kidnapped by what I call “freelancers” – that is, Gazan civilians, or at least a group that was not part of Hamas.
For what it’s worth, I believe their deaths occurred quite early, because otherwise they would have been exchanged with the other civilian women and children back in late 2023.
Shiri’s husband and Kfir and Ariel’s father, Yarden Bibas, was returned from captivity recently. What he is going through can only be imagined, but for me the analogy is to a WWII concentration camp survivor who manages to survive the horrors of the war and the camps, only to find that most of his family members were murdered there (Otto Frank comes to mind for me). Yarden does still have some living relatives, though, although his in-laws – Shiri’s parents – were murdered on October 7, 2023:
Shiri’s father José Luis (Yossi) Silberman, and his wife, Margit Shnaider Silberman, were also presumed to be missing from the kibbutz. Margit Shnaider Silberman moved to Israel from Peru in the 1970s. José Luis (Yossi) Silberman was originally from Argentina, both Silbermans were in their 60s. The Silbermans were later found dead and officially identified as deceased on 21 October.
It seems likely to me that Shiri’s grandparents were Holocaust survivors who had fled to South America, although I can’t find anything to substantiate that.
Rest in peace Shiri Bibas, Ariel Bibas, Kfir Bibas, Yossi Silberman, Margit Silberman, and Oded Lifshitz.