A Day of Deep National Grief

The remains of four dead hostages, said to be Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas, along with Oded Lifshitz, were driven from the border with the Gaza Strip to the L Greenberg Institute of Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir on Thursday for identification.

Such is the ruthless nature of the terrorism experienced by Israel over many years, the coffins had to be screened carefully for booby traps once they were handed over by the Red Cross.

Israelis lined the route in silence as the bodies were transported - a sign of the deep grief felt by the whole nation.

Photo by Israel’s Police Spokesperson’s Unit

President Isaac Herzog summed up the feelings with a post on X saying:

The Bibas family came to symbolise the barbaric cruelty of the Hamas assault on southern Israel on 7th October 2023. Video footage of the terrified mother, 32-year-old Shiri Bibas, clutching 4-year-old Ariel and 9-month-old Kfir as they were pushed away from their home by terrorists has lodged in the memories of most Israelis and many, many people around the world.

Israelis and members of the Red Cross had hoped that Hamas would not make the handover a public event, but the terrorists followed a similar pattern to the previous releases of living hostages, with masked gunmen and hundreds of other Gazans gathered around cheering - cheering about a dead mother and her two children!

Israel’s Diaspora Minister, Amichai Chikli, wrote on X strong words summarising Israel’s frustration about the general failure of other countries to condemn Hamas:

‘One of the West’s greatest failures is its refusal to acknowledge the existence of pure evil.
We have raised generations to believe that monsters exist only in fairy tales,
that there is no true right or wrong, and that all cultures are equal.

And then comes this accursed day, a day of horror and shame, when an elderly man,
a mother, and her two children: Oded Lipschitz, Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas
 - who were slaughtered by Hamas terrorists,
paraded like trophies before a cheering, flag-waving crowd in Gaza. Pure evil.’