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Did Israel bomb the Bibas family then hide their deaths to collapse the November 2023 ceasefire?

As Netanyahu claims to defend “civilization,” evidence suggests that he rejected Hamas’ November 2023 offer to return living and dead Bibas family members in order to resume the war.

Dan Cohen

Netanyahu holds a picture of the deceased Bibas family at an officers’ graduation ceremony on February 23, 2025. Source: Ynet

On November 30, 2023, negotiations were underway between Israel and Hamas to extend a temporary ceasefire that had begun a week before.

The previous few days had been marked by jubilant scenes of reuniting families as the Palestinian resistance released 105 women, children, elderly people, and foreigners taken captive on October 7, and Israel released 240 Palestinian hostages and prisoners – 107 of whom were under 18 and three-quarters had not been convicted of a crime.

Relatives of Shiri, Yarden, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas, the orange-haired family that became a symbol of October 7 around the world, hoped for good news as Hamas released captives. However, each day their hopes were dashed as their loved ones’ names did not appear on any of the lists.

On the morning of November 30, another nightmare unfolded when Hamas published a video of Yarden Bibas screaming in agony after being informed that his wife and two young children had been killed in an Israeli airstrike.

“Netanyahu, you bombed and killed my wife and my two children, who were the most important things in my life! Bring them back home so they can be buried in Israel! I beg you to bring me, my wife, and my children back home!” he wailed.

The video contained Hamas’ offer to “transfer the Bibas family's bodies and release their father for their burial, along with two Zionist detainees.”

Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari called the video “psychological terror” and said it was working to determine if Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas had indeed been killed.

Hours after Hamas published the video, negotiations to extend the ceasefire broke down.

Israel’s mega-assault on the Gaza Strip resumed, having already killed at least 14,800 Palestinians including 6,000 children. With the full backing of the Biden administration, the slaughter would continue until January 2025, when U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, just days before taking office, forced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire.

While Israel blamed Hamas for the breakdown of the ceasefire, contemporaneous reports indicate that Netanyahu walked away from negotiations in order to avoid the transfer of the Bibas family’s corpses.

Among Israelis who supported a ceasefire and exchange, the Bibas family had become – with Shiri filmed as she desperately gripped her two young boys – the most potent symbol, not only of Hamas’ cruelty against the most defenseless civilians, but of the Israeli government’s total failure to protect the residents of the settlements surrounding Gaza.

Thus, any reinforcement of the notion that the Israeli government had abandoned them could have turned the tide in Israeli and international public opinion against resumption of the war.

As the end of the temporary ceasefire neared, negotiations were underway to extend it. Netanyahu and his cabinet, stacked with fanatical ministers and lawmakers, who had been demanding nothing less than a full ethnic cleansing of Gaza and had drafted official plans for its implementation, were looking for a way to resume the war.

Israel made a maximalist and deceptive demand for the release of all female captives, a proposal Hamas rejected because it considered soldiers, regardless of their sex, as legitimate prisoners of war. Hamas instead presented in the Yarden Bibas video its counter-proposal to release the bodies of Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas, and to allow the father to attend the funeral of his wife and children.

This was widely reported at the time.

French state outlet AFP published an article titled “Hamas says offered to hand over remains of hostage baby, family,” noting that “Hamas's armed wing announced that Shiri, Kfir, and Ariel had been killed in an Israeli bombing before the now-lapsed truce went into effect -- a claim Israel's military has said it is investigating, but has yet to confirm.”

“Until now it was believed that they were alive,” reported AFP correspondent Jordana Miller.

Veteran Israeli correspondent Barak Ravid published an article in Axios stating that “Hamas in a statement said it had offered to release elderly men and two Israeli hostages, as well as the bodies of hostages it said were killed during Israeli airstrikes in Gaza” which “included a mother and her two children.”

Ravid’s article also noted that “Hamas said it offered to release the father of the children so that he could attend their funeral.”

Barak Ravid’s report on why the November 2024 ceasefire broke down. Source: Axios. 

Several other publications, including The Guardian, CBS, Haaretz, The Times of Israel and the Daily Mail published written and video reports on Hamas’ statement and proposal to transfer the Bibas family’s corpses.

None of the reports suggested, as Israel did, that Hamas was lying to advance its goals.

Hamas’s proposal was shot down by Israeli officials, who were intent on resuming the war on Gaza.

"Israel will not address propaganda-based reports coming from Hamas,” Netanyahu’s office told AFP.

‘They lie to us, they sacrifice them’

While Israel abandoned Yarden Bibas and his family’s corpses in Gaza as it continued to commit genocide, it killed several other Israeli captives and lied to the families about them.

On January 16, 2024, Israel told the family of Yossi Sharabi that he was murdered in Hamas captivity. However, weeks later, Netanyahou’s government was forced to admit Sharabi was killed by Israeli airstrikes.

The day after the Israeli government lied to Sharabi’s family, it was revealed that the military had killed three captives in Jabalya, then lied to their families that Hamas had murdered them. The deception was only revealed when Mayaan Sherman, the mother of soldier Ron Sherman, had her son’s corpse examined and found that they had asphyxiated in a tunnel from poison gasses released as a byproduct of Israeli bombing, what she called “premeditated murder” carried out by the very military her son served in.

Meirav Svirsky, whose brother Itai was killed by Hamas as a result of Israeli military pressure, lambasted the Netanyahu government. "They lie to us, they sacrifice them, they give up on them, I was given up on completely,” she remarked on national television.

Propaganda value

While Israel abandoned and sacrificed the captives, and deceived the desperate families, its diplomats exploited the plight of the Bibas family in the international arena for maximum propaganda value.

On January 9, 2024, Israeli ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan stepped to the podium in New York City, brandishing a birthday cake decorated with the face of Kfir Bibas, who would have turned one year-old that day.

“Kfir, this birthday cake is for you. You are the reason Israel is fighting day and night,” he railed. “I only wish for you, for your first birthday, that next year, next year God willing, you will celebrate your birthday surrounded by your family and that the suffering of Israeli babies is important to the UN.”

At the same time, Israel arranged a special media tour branded the “World's Saddest Birthday" for local and international press at Kibbutz Nir Oz, and held events in Tel Aviv and cities around the world.

Hannibal Directive

All along, the danger Israel’s unprecedented bombing campaign presented to the captives held inside Gaza was obvious and widely discussed.

As I documented extensively in a January 2024 investigation, Netanyahu had plotted from the war’s earliest days to sabotage the families of captives who sought a ceasefire, and the Israeli right-wing openly called for the captives and hostages – including children and babies – to be sacrificed for the conquest of Gaza.

This kind of sentiment was echoed in Washington too.

Elliott Abrams, longtime neoconservative whose career in government had spanned from the Reagan administration to the first Trump administration, on October 11 advocated that Israel should reject negotiations with Hamas to save the captives.

“Israel cannot stop the invasion, cannot stop destroying Hamas because of that,” he explained. “I think they're going to have to, in this case, say ‘We can't today play that game anymore, we're going to have to do what we do.’”

The Bibas family returns in coffins

For 13 more months, Bibas family relatives rallied on their behalf but tempered their expectations and prepared for the possibility that Hamas had told the truth about Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir’s fate.

“I have real strong faith that they are alive and well. I must not believe otherwise for a moment,” Shiri Bibas’ cousin Yossi Schneider said as he toured the destruction of the Bibas home.

Public vigils with the color orange, representing the haircolor of the two children, were held all along. It was an ironic twist; the movement that sought to re-establish settlements in Gaza had long used the color orange and continued to as it held conferences making plans to colonize Gaza’s entirety.

Israelis pass out shirts at a Gaza settlement conference. Source: The Times of Israel

After months of official silence on the Bibas family, Hagari admitted on January 25, weeks after the incoming Trump administration forced Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire, that there were “grave concerns for their fate.”

On February 1, Yarden Bibas was released from captivity and returned to Israel.

The family still had no confirmation on the fate of Shiri, Kfir, and Ariel. Nonetheless, the Israeli government published their names as officially dead, violating protocol that requires informing the family before releasing the information to the public. This act enraged the family.

"We have been waiting for 16 months for certainty that they could not give us, and now it has been determined before they are here?? Before they have been identified?? Before we are informed?" Ofri Bibas, Yarden’s sister, wrote on Facebook.

While the publication was said to be a mistake, it may also have been a Freudian slip, demonstrating that the Israeli government indeed knew Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir were dead.

On February 19, the Bibas family received official confirmation of their deaths. Their remains were transferred by Hamas in black coffins the next day, along with that of Oded Lifshitz, an elderly man also abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz.

On February 21, the Israeli military announced that Palestinians had murdered Ariel and Kfir Bibas and then mutilated their corpses to make it appear as if they had been killed in airstrikes.

“Contrary to Hamas’s lies, Ariel and Kfir were not killed in an airstrike. Ariel and Kfir Bibas were murdered by terrorists in cold blood,” he said. “The terrorists did not shoot the two young boys. They killed them with their bare hands. Afterwards, they committed horrific acts to cover up these atrocities.”

Hagari claimed that this conclusion was based on “forensic findings, the identification process and intelligence that supports the findings.”

The following day, Chen Kugel, a former Israeli military doctor who heads the Israeli National Forensic Institute of Medicine, announced that their examination “found no evidence of injuries caused by bombing.”

However, Chen Kugel had previously been caught repeatedly lying that he personally witnessed beheaded babies on October 7, despite the fact that only one Israeli baby was killed that day as a result of a stray bullet, and none were beheaded.

In the immediate aftermath of the transfer of the Bibas family’s corpses, the Israeli government’s claim that Palestinians had killed them with their “bare hands”, lacking any evidence, was uncritically spread across legacy media outlets and by politicians and influencers including Donald Trump Jr. and Rep. Richtie Torres.

Netanyahu attacks the ceasefire again

With the ceasefire scheduled to move into its second phase, Netanyahu once again began to exploit the suffering of the Bibas family in order to upend it and return to war. On the national stage, the prime minister made bombastic claims about the nature of their deaths that had not been shared with the grieving family.

On February 23, Netanyahu addressed an officers’ graduation ceremony, waving a photo of the Bibas family.

“They strangled the tender children with their own hands, and if they could, they would have murdered all of us with the same level of cruelty,” Netanyahu declares to cheers.

"Why didn't you save them?" a group of audience members shouted.

Ofri Bibas-Levy, the sister of Yarden Bibas, sent a cease and desist letter the next day to Netanyahu’s office and others, threatening legal action if he continued to discuss details of their deaths.

"This is outright abuse of a family that has already been enduring hell for 16 months," Bibas-Levy wrote on Facebook.

At the same time, Israel launched a massive propaganda offensive on social media, repeating Netanyahu’s claims against the Bibas family’s wishes.

The Israeli governemnt mounted a propaganda campaign claiming Hamas murdered the Bibas family, against the wishes of the grieving family members. Source: X/Israel

On Tuesday, February 25, Netanyahu took his act to AIPAC, this time adding a new detail that Hamas first strangled the mother in front of the children, a sequence of events that would be impossible to determine, even if it were true.

“They crushed their tiny skulls with unspeakable cruelty and barbarism. What monsters! Their evil knows no bounds,” Netanyahu thundered. “We will ensure that no child, no parent, no family will ever face such horror again. This is our duty, this is our sacred obligation for we are fighting a war between civilization and barbarism and I say civilization must win, and civilization will win!”

While Netanyahu spares no effort or artifice in trying to wreck another ceasefire, using the Bibas family as the pretext, the lives of the remaining 63 Israeli captives and the millions of Palestinians of Gaza hang in the balance.