For 16 months, the smiling faces of Shiri Bibas and his two young children, Ariel and Kfir, slowly retired against the background of Israeli life as their photographs – published on walls and bus stops immediately after the abduction of the family in Gaza in the ‘ October 2023 – He began to vanish, tear and peel.
On Friday, the lives of the Bibas and the disturbing deaths were taken up at the front line in the collective consciousness of Israel in such a surprising and disturbing way that it triggers a new alarm on the fate of the fragile ceased the fire in Gaza.
On Friday morning, the Israeli army announced that Mrs. Bibas’s body nominally returned, together with those of her children, from Hamas to Israel Thursday – seemed to be someone else’s. And an autopsy of the two boys, aged between 4 and 8 months at the time of their kidnapping, revealed that they were killed by terrorists in Gaza, the military said.
Hamas, who previously said he had been killed in an Israeli missile strike, declared in a declaration that was investigating the statements and suggested that Mrs. Bibas’s body could have been mistakenly confused for that of a Palestinian who died in the aftermath chaotic of an Israeli attack. Neither could be verified independently.
The news sparked a paroxyism of fury and agony in Israel rarely seen from the tumultuous times that followed the attack of Hamas to Israel on October 7, 2023, when they were killed up to 1,200 people and 251 were abducete, including Mrs. Bibas and her children , the most fatal day in Israeli history.
Responding to the announcement of the military, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel returned to the language of revenge that defined his speeches in the aftermath of that attack.
“May God avenge their blood,” said Netanyahu in a speech recorded at the nation on Friday morning. “And we will also have our revenge.”
Netanyahu’s response reabbiente was maintained in most of the Israeli political spectrum. Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister, said in a transmission interview that the treatment of Bibas showed how “the majority of the Gazas wants to kill all the Israelis”. (The survey last autumn suggested that less than 40 percent of the Palestinians of Gaza supported the attack of 7 October, decreasing from over 70 % at the beginning of last year.)
For some Israelis, the horror underlined the need to restart the war to defeat Hamas once and for all. The current respite is destined to spend at the beginning of March unless Hamas and Israel cannot agree on an extension. “The only solution is the destruction of Hamas, and this must not be postponed,” said Bezalel Smotrich, far -right finance minister, in an assignment on social media.
But others asked for calm, claiming that the fate of the Bibas family exemplified the reason why the truce had to be extended to bring home about 70 hostages still kept, both dead and alive, in Gaza.
The leadership of the village in Nir Oz, Bibas’s hometown, issued a declaration on Friday who invited Israel to “follow our values and the clear requests of the Bibas family right now: release, not revenge. The state must report Shiri By any means, in a way that does not endanger the continuation of the agreement and the immediate release of all the hostages.
Isaac Herzog, the mainly ceremonial president of Israel, also invited the government to “remember our highest duty – to do everything possible to bring home each of our sisters and kidnapped brothers. All of them. Until the last.”
Six living Israeli hostages will be released on Saturday and analysts said that it was unlikely that Israel would do anything to jeopardize their freedom. Hamas announced their names on Friday morning, projecting a sense of business as usual. The six included two Israelian citizens-Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed-which were captured by Hamas years before the 2023 attack after entering Gaza alone.
The long -term future of the truce seemed less clear. On Friday, Arab leaders would have met in Saudi Arabia to try to eliminate a proposal for the reconstruction of the post -war period of Gaza who would have allowed the peaceful transfer of power from Hamas to an alternative Palestinian administration.
But in Israel, analysts have hypothesized that the government would prefer to expel Hamas by force.
“If he was up to Netanyahu and his far-right partners, then next week-the completion of the first phase of the agreement, with the return of four other bodies of cadent-caught-the path would be paved for the resumption of the war In Gaza, “wrote Amos Harel, a commentator for military affairs for Haaretz, a leftist newspaper. “This time, they promise, without restrictions.”
Johnatan Reiss Reports contributed by Tel Aviv e The cartilage of Sheikh Ahmad From Haifa, Israel.