TEL AVIV, Israel—Kfir Bibas is the most famous baby in the world.
If he’s still alive.
The red-haired tot was 9 months old when he was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists from Kibbutz Nir Oz on Oct. 7, 2023, along with his parents, Yarden and Shiri Bibas, and his brother, Ariel, 4.
He celebrated his first birthday, if he was still alive, in captivity on Jan. 18. He is, or was, the youngest hostage taken that day.
His grandparents, Jose “Yossi” and Margit Silberman, were also victims. They disappeared during the attack. Their bodies were identified after being recovered two weeks later in Gaza.
Shiri Bibas’s cousin Yosi Shnaider told The Epoch Times that he learned they were hostages because Hamas put their images on social media that day.
He had called his cousin and her mother, “and no one answered.” So he started going through Hamas’s pages on social media.
“About two or three minutes after they had been kidnapped, they broadcast the movie,” he said.
They were still at the kibbutz, he said in an interview on March 5 at the Forum of Families of Hostages and Missing Persons in Tel Aviv.
Hamas announced they were dead about 50 days later, Mr. Shnaider said.
“But we have no proof,” he said. “It’s just something that Hamas told us.”
Meanwhile, hostages who were released have reported that they were alive, and Hamas released a video of Kfir on the last day of the November 2023 cease-fire.
“That was the last time we heard something of them,” Mr. Shnaider said.
Mothers and children were one focus of the hostage releases during the cease-fire, he said. But Shiri Bibas and her children were not released.
There was a report that Hamas had sold them to another organization and then lost contact with them, he said.
There was hope during the cease-fire they would be freed, but Hamas couldn’t find them, and said they were dead.
“So it was too convenient,” he said, an apparent ploy by Hamas to “clear the table” and maybe get the cease-fire to continue.
Mothers and their children were priorities in the exchange. Not being able to find them, Hamas needed to get past that issue, and declaring them dead seemed a way to do it, he said.
Mr. Shnaider said he continues to hope they’re alive.
Rebecca Geller, a coordinator at the hostage family center, said, “Unless the state of Israel announces that one of the hostages has been killed, we assume they’re alive.”
Mr. Shnaider said he guesses Hamas may want to keep them, and keep them alive, for their symbolic value.
They have been among the most publicized hostages, with Kfir’s face particularly well-known now around the world.
At least one other hostage was declared dead and then turned up alive, he said.
“It seems very odd to me that the most valued thing you have, you would lose,” he said. “I am sure they’re keeping them very close to them and very secure because they know they’re worth a lot.”
He said he doesn’t think that the Israel Defense Forces would give up more for them.
“They’re like every other [person] who has been kidnapped,” Mr. Shnaider said. “Shiri is not worth more than anyone else who has been kidnapped.
“Our story is more unique because they are the only two children who remain over there. And Kfir was the youngest one kidnapped.
“Israel is still blamed for everything. Kidnapping an 8 1/2-month-old baby. What do you do with him? They know they cannot hold him. They know they cannot give him the right treatment.”
Mr. Shnaider said he is bitter about the world’s treatment of Israel after such an attack. He noted that 700,000 people have been killed in Syria, some by chemical weapons banned by international law.
“Real genocide,” he said, a word hardly ever attached to Syria but slung around often against Israel.
“What country can attack the United States without the United States shooting back and destroying them?” he said. “What country can attack France and not be destroyed? Or Britain?
“We’ve been attacked from Lebanon, from Syria, from Iraq, and Gaza and everybody’s telling us that we need to be peaceful and calm down and not attack back and be humanitarian. Find the logic to it.
“What’s heartbreaking is that the world has covered its ears and eyes and mouths and doesn’t say anything.
“It doesn’t want to see anything. It doesn’t want to hear the story. The fact that the world is allowing, for the first time in history, for a mother and a baby to be kidnapped and be hostages.
“[Hamas] are always taking the red line, and pushing it a little bit further.”
He said that if people start kidnapping babies as a playing card, it could be “catastrophic for the future.”
“And the fact that the women’s organizations don’t say anything,” he said, alluding to the deafening silence for months by U.N. Women and other organizations about Hamas’s use of rape on and after Oct. 7, 2023, as a weapon of war.
“The international children’s organizations don’t say anything. Everyone’s shutting his mouth. Nobody’s screaming.
“I saw an interview with one of the chiefs of the United Nations. She was a woman, and they asked her about the rapes that happened in Israel, and she said there was no proof.”
On April 2, former hostage Mia Regev, released in November 2023, told the Knesset’s Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality that all the female Israeli hostages are being raped or sexually abused.
Amit Soussana, another released hostage, went public recently with her own story.
She was sexually assaulted by one of her guards at gunpoint on Oct. 24, 2023, she told The New York Times.
She had held him off for several days by telling him that her menstrual period, which was over, was continuing, she said.
Hamas’s own videos and photos on Oct. 7, 2023, showed injured or dead women naked below the waist or with bloodstains around their genital areas.
Surviving witnesses have declared they saw women gang-raped, including one shot in the head by a man who then continued raping her.
Captured Hamas terrorists admitted it in interrogation videos and said they were both told to do so and given religious clearance by imams to violate Islamic law.
First responders, medical personnel, and body recovery specialists all told investigators they'd seen signs of rape.
“How blind can you be?” Mr. Shnaider said. “That’s what I’m experiencing. That the world can keep silent, and approving, just shows where the world’s going.
“Hamas is a radical Muslim organization. This is a different name for the same [people] that did 9/11.”
Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, and other terrorist groups all do the same thing, he said.
“The same Muslim organizations, and the world’s just hugging them all the time and wants to give them supplies and wants to talk with them,” Mr. Shnaider said.
“You cannot talk with somebody that only wants to kill you.
“You want to make peace with someone who wants to make peace with you.
“You cannot make peace with someone that’s saying out loud that ‘we want to destroy you, we want to kill you,’ just because you’re a Jew.”
The world needs to understand, he said, that if they finish with Israel, other parts of the world are next: South America, Paris, London.
“That’s the agenda,” he said. “Hamas will come to you in the end.
“What happened to us on the seventh of October, it’s just a matter of time until it happens in Europe.”
He said he doesn’t understand why the United States pressures Israel so much for a cease-fire or to provide humanitarian aid in Gaza—aid that, he said, is largely diverted to Hamas.
“As soon as the truck passes the border, their people get in all the trucks and take in all the supplies,” Mr. Shnaider said.
“First of all, they take in all the supplies for themselves. And then what they’ve got left, they sell to their own people.
“So what we’re doing is, on the one hand, fighting them and, on the other, giving them supplies and money.
“How can you win? Nobody would ever tell America to stop after 9/11. Nobody would tell them to stop attacking Iraq. Everybody supported you. The only country in the world where they say this, is Israel.”
He said he has limited sympathy for Gaza residents and can barely contain his anger when he talks of them.
He knows, he said, that there were civilians who accompanied Hamas on its Oct. 7, 2023, raid.
“There were civilians who went inside the kibbutzes and butchered people, raped and kidnapped families,” Mr. Shnaider said.
And of those who didn’t, many celebrated the atrocities in the streets.
He said that neighboring countries have a low opinion of Gazans.
Egypt and other countries won’t let them in.
“There is no country in the world that wants to deal with them,” he said. “Wherever they go, they destroy everything they touch.”
He cited Israel’s pullout from Gaza in 2005. Israelis left businesses such as greenhouses to the Gazans, hopeful they would use them.
“They destroyed everything,” he said.
And they used foreign aid to build the terror tunnel network.
The hostage family center is a block away from what’s now called Hostage Square in Tel Aviv.
The square commemorates the hostages to keep their plight in the world’s eyes. The family center is a place where the families can come.
Here, they can get medical and legal help, access foreign and local media, meet delegations, and hold press conferences. There’s also a diplomacy team and a delegations team that organizes trips.
One volunteer, Vardit Kaplan, said she’s a tourism consultant and worked as an Israeli consul for tourism in the United States based in New York.
Ms. Kaplan volunteers in part because she was once a spokesperson for the Ministry of Tourism and has experience handling media.
“And they can get three meals a day,” she said.
It’s open 24 hours, she said, accessible for hostage families who sleep in tents in the square. They can take showers at the center.
The center stocks and distributes “swag,” she said, like hostage posters, sweatshirts, and dog tags.
Like so many efforts in Israel, it was launched spontaneously by volunteers after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.
The center is housed on several floors donated by Checkpoint, an Israeli tech firm, Ms. Geller said.
