At a Jaffa community centre and beyond, tragic news of Bibas family’s fate sparks confusion, mourning, and rage

JTA – As she watched a cascade of seemingly conflicting news reports about the three highest-profile Israeli hostages, Noam Nisim didn’t know what to think.

First, a popular Israeli news programme posted on Instagram that the Bibas family had received official word that its relatives, Shiri and her children, Kfir and Ariel, had been killed in captivity. The dismal news appeared to confirm a Hamas announcement that the bodies of the mother and two young boys would be returned to Israel on Thursday, 20 February.

Then the post was deleted.

Around the same time, relatives of the Bibas family issued a statement that they had not, in fact, received confirmation of the three hostages’ fate. The Hamas announcement about Shiri, Kfir, and Ariel, they said, had thrown them into “turmoil”.

For Nisim, a Pilates instructor at a Jaffa community centre, the whirlwind of news just created more uncertainty coupled with a sinking feeling that the Bibases wouldn’t be coming home alive.

“I don’t know how to react yet because I don’t even know what to react to,” she said on Tuesday. “I’m in shock. But on the other hand, it’s not like we didn’t know. We’ve prepared ourselves for this. Still, it doesn’t make it hurt any less.”

Nisim was one of many Israelis left reeling on Tuesday after the Hamas announcement, which appears to portend a tragic end for a family that has come to symbolise the intractable pain of the hostage crisis both in Israel and around the world.

A video of Shiri, tearful and desperate, being abducted into Gaza while clutching her sons became an indelible image of Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack. The pain was compounded that November, when Hamas released a video showing Shiri’s captive husband, Yarden, sobbing after he was told that his wife and children had been killed in an Israeli airstrike. Israel investigated that claim, but hasn’t confirmed it.

Yarden was taken captive separately and released earlier this month.

Still, Israeli pronouncements about the family have become increasingly dire, with an official expressing “grave concerns” about their fate last month.

Some Israelis are holding out the slimmest of hopes. Liz Peretz, a nurse at the nearby Wolfson Medical Center who was also at the Jaffa community centre, said she was still clinging to the chance that the reports weren’t accurate, and predicted a harsh reaction if they are.

“If it turns out to be true, the people of this country will create a huge uproar against the state, which abandoned that family in the worst way possible,” she said.

Peretz’s son, Nehorai, 11, assured his mother that the Hamas statement would turn out to be “fake news”. He suggested that the announcement amounted to psychological warfare.

“They’re lying,” he said of the terror group. “They want us to cry, and then they’ll bring them back. They just want to make us suffer. They’re never going to send back bodies.”

As Israelis coped with impending grief, some also turned to anger and thoughts of vengeance at the murder of a mother and two boys, who were nine months and four years old when they were taken captive. Or Benaroya, a cashier, said that everything should be done “to find justice for them”.

Asked what that “justice” looks like, she said, “Killing everyone who is involved. Even those not in Hamas, the people who support them. They all have to pay.”

Outside a soccer stadium in the area, one of the harshest reactions came from Sagi Vanunu, a local restaurant employee. He said Israel should “declare a world war against Gaza” after Hamas’s next release of living hostages on Saturday. Otherwise, he said, “it means that the country no longer values life and does not have the right to exist”.

Feelings of anger at the news extended beyond the Jaffa neighbourhood. Dan Shapiro, who served as United States ambassador to Israel under President Barack Obama, said he was feeling a mix of emotions, and called for the dismantling of Hamas.

“The news about Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas is devastating,” he wrote on X. “The mourning of their deaths is accompanied by a barely suppressible rage. Their killers are monsters. This war will not end until Hamas is fully removed from power.”

The mercuriality was heightened with the understanding that in exchange for a total of four deceased hostages to be returned on Thursday, Israel would release 47 Palestinian security prisoners. The idea that Israel had compromised with a terror group ate at 15-year-old Shalev Shaki.

“We have to do everything to bring them back,” he said. “But at the same time, giving in to terrorists isn’t right. I think we need to hit them hard so that all the hostages come home now, without making concessions.”

Kira Dan Or, a parenting consultant nearby, considered how the return of the bodies of Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir would affect their father and husband, Yarden.

“Poor Yarden, there’s no consolation, no closure in this. He will never know what fate befell them, how they died,” she said. “He’ll be left with questions for the rest of his life. And what kind of life will that be?”

Tuesday’s dismal announcement came alongside some good news: The families of the final six living hostages to be released in the first phase of the Israel-Hamas ceasefire, namely, Omer Wenkert, Omer Shem Tov, Eliya Cohen, Tal Shoham, Avera Mengistu, and Hisham al-Sayed, were informed by Israeli authorities that their loved ones would be released on Saturday.

But that news also led to more ambiguity. Fourteen hostages are left to be released in the first phase, which will last until early March, eight of whom are confirmed to be dead, and six who are alive. The news that six living hostages are due to be released on Saturday left Israelis, including the relatives of hostages, to decipher on their own whether their loved ones were among the living.

“Do I have to draw my own conclusions?” the Ynet news site quoted Danny Elgart, the brother of 70-year-old Danish-Israeli hostage Itzik Elgart, as asking. “If you publish the names of six people who are alive, it means that the rest aren’t alive, but we in the family weren’t informed of anything. We’ve become objects, not people,” he said.