Kfir Bibas was less than nine months old on October 7 when Hamas forces attacked Nir Oz, a kibbutz in southern Israel near the Gaza Strip. A symbolic anniversary was celebrated in his farming village.
Several hundred people gathered in a square in Tel Aviv this Thursday, January 18, to release a large number of orange balloons. A date that has become symbolic since the Hamas attacks in Israel. It is actually the first birthday of Kfir Bibas, the youngest hostage the Israeli army says is being held in Gaza.
This little red-haired baby, kidnapped on October 7 along with his four-year-old brother Ariel and his parents, has become one of the faces of the hostages still held by Hamas.
Declared dead by Hamas, no confirmation from IDF
In the farming village of Nir Oz, the youngest of the approximately 250 hostages forcibly kidnapped by Hamas and its allies in the small Palestinian territory was supposed to celebrate his first birthday on January 18th. A symbolic birthday took place there today, and no one knows anything new about the Bibas children.
“We have the last two youngest children in Gaza. We have to assume that they are alive and pretend to be alive in order to be able to bring them back,” Yosi Schnaider, cousin of Shiri Bibas' mother, told BFMTV about Kfir.
Hamas, which said it had “transferred” the Bibas family to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, announced the death of the baby and his family in an Israeli bombing last November during the humanitarian ceasefire. Israeli authorities have not confirmed the family's death.
“Several times a day we talk to diplomats, influential people… We ask questions of the whole world, we ask all the questions to try to understand them, but no, we have no information, no news since October 7th. They have completely disappeared. “Yosi Schnaider continued.
“We are all afraid of what could happen to them”
In Hamas propaganda images, Shiri Bibas appears with her two children, captured and surrounded by armed men, while her husband Yarden, covered in blood, is taken elsewhere.
Yarden Bibas, who reappears in a Nov. 30 Hamas propaganda video, is still alive but in very poor mental health, according to a recently released hostage who said she was forced to tell him about the deaths of his wife and his to tell both children accordingly All Israel News.
“We are all afraid of what could happen to them there,” said Yosi Schnaider. The parents also want “the world to wake up and cry with us.”
“It's time to wake up, you can realize who our enemy is, you can learn from us and what they did to us,” Yosi Schnaider concluded.
About 250 people were taken hostage on October 7, 2023 and taken to Gaza. While around a hundred of them were released under the ceasefire reached at the end of November, 132 remain imprisoned, 27 of whom are believed to have died, authorities said. Israelis.
Clémence Dibout and Hugues Garnier