The Israeli army formally identified the bodies of Ariel and Kfir Bibas, returned by terrorist group Hamas on Feb. 20, but said the third body was not that of their mother, Shiri Bibas.
“Based on the intelligence available to us and forensic findings from the identification process, Ariel and Kfir Bibas were brutally murdered by terrorists in captivity in November 2023,” the IDF said.
“This is a violation of utmost severity by the Hamas terrorist organization, which is obligated under the [cease-fire] agreement to return four deceased hostages. We demand that Hamas return Shiri home along with all our hostages.”
The disclosure comes at a sensitive time, with negotiations about to resume on the Gaza cease-fire’s second phase. The Bibas family’s plight, and the uncertainty about their fates, came to symbolize the hostage crisis to many in Israel and around the world.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said earlier in the day that the fourth hostage whose body was returned on Feb. 20, Oded Lifshitz, was also murdered.
“Following the completion of the identification process by the National Center of Forensic Medicine and the Israel Police, IDF representatives have informed the Lifshitz family that their loved one, Oded Lifshitz of blessed memory, was murdered in captivity by the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization,” the office said in a public statement.
Dr. Chen Kugel, director of Abu Kabir, the National Institute of Forensic Medicine, in a statement on Feb. 20 to the media, confirmed the remains as those of Lifshitz and noted he had been murdered.
Kugel said the institute has since the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack worked to identify those killed in and after the attack.
Kugel said Lifshitz, 83 when he was abducted, had been slain in captivity more than a year ago.
On Oct. 7, 2023, about 3,000 Hamas terrorists blew holes in the 50-kilometer-long wall separating the Gaza Strip from Israel and drove in. They attacked border communities and military bases, which were lightly staffed for the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah and the Sabbath. Some flew in on paragliders. Gazan civilians followed them in to loot the communities.
They killed 1,200 people, mostly Israeli civilians but also hundreds of IDF troops, kidnapped 251, wounded thousands, killed family dogs, and took the hostages and some dead bodies of those they had murdered back to Gaza.
Ariel Bibas was 4 years old and Kfir Bibas 10 months old when they were murdered, the IDF said.
The Bibas family said they are withholding comment until the bodies are confirmed as those of Shiri Bibas and her sons. They asked that the public refrain “from eulogizing our loved ones until there is confirmation following final identification.”
Shiri’s husband, Yarden Bibas, father of the two boys, was also taken hostage and held separately. He was released Feb. 1. Hamas has said the three died in an Israeli air strike early in the war.
The government on Wednesday had announced the bodies to be returned included those of the Bibases, without having informed the family. The IDF later apologized for having done so without permission from the surviving family, saying it was “an error made in good faith.”
Lifshitz, a retired journalist and great-grandfather, was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz, as were the Bibases. His wife Yocheved, kidnapped and beaten by her captors, was freed on Oct. 23, 2023, along with fellow captive Nurit Cooper.
Her husband “fought for the Palestinians his whole life. They betrayed him and took him to hell,” Yocheved Lifshitz said.
Oded Lifshitz, in a long career, wrote for the now-defunct left-leaning newspaper Al-Hamishmar, associated with the kibbutz movement.
In 1972, he defended Bedouins who had been expelled from the Sinai Peninsula by Israeli authorities. During the Lebanese civil war and Israel’s invasion a decade later, he was one of the first journalists to report on the Sabra and Shatila massacres in which Israeli-backed Christian militias killed between 800 and 2,000 Palestinians in Beirut refugee camps.
More recently, Lifshitz, an Arabic speaker, worked for years with Road for Recovery, an organization helping Palestinians receive medical treatment in Israel. His family said he would drive weekly to the Erez crossing on the Gaza border to pick up sick Palestinians and take them to Israeli hospitals.
Lifshitz’s son Yizhar said on Thursday the family had received word of him after his capture from a released hostage who had been held with him for two weeks in an apartment in Khan Yunis. He had been shot in the arm during the attack while trying to hold closed the door to his home’s safe room.
A grandson, Dekel, said his grandfather suffered from high blood pressure and needed daily medication. The family believed he had died several weeks after being taken hostage, possibly succumbing to harsh conditions and lack of treatment.
“His life ended in a tragic and humiliating, underserved and degrading way,” Yizhar Lifshitz said. “His home was burned down, his wife was kidnapped, having been beaten, which he must have seen ... [he died] without family, without children, without closure.”
“As his son, I would have preferred to know that he was murdered on Oct. 7, outside his home in Nir Oz, rather than having to go through all this suffering and torture and be alone and die like a dog there in Gaza.”
