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They became a powerful symbol of Israel’s hostage crisis after the 2023 attack video led by Hamas showed the Palestinian militants who led an anguished mother grabbing her two small red -haired children. Another video showed the father of the same family who moved away Gaza on a motorcycle, with a bloody head.
On Friday, Hamas said that the 35 -year -old father Yarden Bibas will be one of the three male hostages to be released on Saturday.
The Israelis still expect the news of their wife, Shiri, and their two children, Ariel, now 5 years old, and Kfir, who was 9 months old at the time of his capture, the younger hostage taken to Gaza. Last week, Daniel Hagari, an Israeli military spokesman, seemed to prepare the public because of the probability that they would not come alive, saying The army was “seriously worried” by the mother and children.
Hamas said last year that Mrs. Bibas and her children had been killed by an Israeli air attack, but Israeli officials have never confirmed that. Several hostages were killed in Gaza by Israeli forces, accidentally or possibly fired as a result of Israeli air attacks. The army also said that some civil hostages may have been killed by Israeli forces, since they were being kidnapped on October 7 attack.
The Bibas family has gone through “a twisted reality of hell,” said a relative, Yifat Zailer, in an interview last year.
Four’s family was among more than 180 residents of Kibbutz Nir Oz, an agricultural community in southern Israel, which were killed or kidnapped in the October 7 attack. Since then, the family became the faces of a national traum combatants and civilians.
According to Israeli officials, more than 1,750 people in Israel have been killed in the war, approximately 1,200 of them on October 7 attack. The toll includes more than 890 members of the Israeli military forces.
For more than a year of waiting, hostage families and their followers have taken orange balloons and orange shirts used in honor of missing children and their ginger hair. They have celebrated great events to mark Kfir’s first birthday, which one has never celebrated one by captivity.
All other children seized in the October 7 attack were released in an agreement of high the previous fire.
Israeli officials pressed Hamas’ negotiators in recent days for more clarity about Mrs. Bibas and their children, according to Israeli media. As a female civilian with children, they were expected to be released in the initial stages of the high fire agreement, before soldiers or men, if they were alive.
Mr. Bibas was kidnapped separately from his family.
In the early hours of the morning before his capture, he sent a text message to his sister, Effri Bibas-Levy, to tell him about the incoming rocket fire, according to an interview he gave him Can, The Israeli public broadcaster. Later, he sent him a text message that the militants had entered the camp. He had a gun, he said, but the militants had automatic rifles.
Then he described scenes of clashes in the Kibbutz and his fear that his two young children could not keep quiet.
“He feels like the end,” he wrote at 9:10 in the morning.
The video of the October 7 attack to Nir Oz revealed images of militants that pierce the main door of the Bibas family.
At some point before her brother was captured, Mrs. Bibas-Levy told Kan, she sent a text message to her and her parents who loved them. At 9:45 in the morning, he wrote: “They are inside.”
Mrs. Bibas-Levy told Kan that the first time she knew about her brother’s kidnapping on October 7 when she saw a video of militants who kidnapped him a few days later.
In November 2023, not long after Hamas said that Mrs. Bibas and her children were killed by Israeli bombings, the group released a video of Mr. Bibas who told her wife and children who had been killed, since He broke crying.
The images of the Bibas family have been chamuscadas in the Israeli psyche throughout the crisis. They were on the cover of one of the most popular daily newspapers in the country, and Average Ahronoth, under the headline “a mother and two small souls, led to darkness.”
And throughout the country, the graffiti represented by the family has appeared in the streets. Some show the baby Kfir holding a pink elephant, as in the photo used for his hostage poster. Others show an imagined meeting of the Bibas family, lighting a Menorah by Hanukkah.
“I know they became a symbol,” said Bibas-Levy at a crying press conference last February. “But for us, it’s our family, and we want them back.”
Johnatan Reiss and Matthew Mpoke Bigg Contributed reports.
