Jihadists Who Murder Babies

Early today Hamas handed over the bodies of four dead Israeli hostages. The transfer took place in front of a cheering crowd of “innocent Gazans” who cheered, danced to music, and took videos and photos of the event. The ceremony was more degrading than the previous handovers because in this case, the hostages were in coffins. The remains provided to the IDF were Shira Bibas, 32 years old at the time of her kidnapping, her sons Ariel (age 4) and Kfir (age 9 months), and Oded Lifshitz (age 84). Ironically, Lifshitz was a peace activist. He volunteered for a Israeli organizations that drives Palestinians to hospital appointments.

The Red Cross initially refused to participate in the macabre Hamas ceremony, but the terrorist group refused to hand over the bodies unless they complied. So, a Red Cross representative signed a document on a stage before the four coffins were handed over.

The Bibas family with their two redheaded children became the global symbol of the struggle to get the hostages released. Their father Yarden Bibas was released earlier this month. Despite Hamas indicating that they had been killed over a year ago, people around the world held out that they may have survived. Their photos were plastered up on city streets around the world. There were commemorations held on the children’s birthdays. The pessimist inside me would not allow me to hope that they were still alive.

For almost a year and a half, many in the West including countless media outlets criticized Israeli for the war conducted in Gaza. Today they were silent. You cannot portray Hamas and Islamic Jihad as misunderstood freedom fighters. The same groups that got away with using their own children as human shields. That felt it was perfectly fine to abduct a mother with two young children where he youngest was still a baby. Then they expect the world to accept that these terrorists didn’t kill them. So, their best narrative is that the IDF killed this family while the terrorist tried to keep them alive. What is already forgotten is that during the October 7 attack, 37 children including two babies were murdered. Some were decapitated or mutilated, and one even burned alive in an oven. In addition, 37 hostages taken to Gaza on October 7 were under 18.

I am a mix of despair and rage. I can’t help but take this personally. This family so much resembles my father’s first family. My dad, Eliya Oksenhendler married Estera Sledzik in 1940 in a Polish ghetto. They had two daughters born in that same ghetto. In April 1942 my father was deported to a forced labour camp. Four months later his family was forcibly crammed into freight cars and taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau. They led to a provisional gas chamber where they were murdered. There was no crematorium yet, so their bodies were dumped into mass graves.

There was no state of Israel to save them. No prisoner exchanges. No one in the West cared enough to save them. And they Nazis blamed the Jews for their own genocide. Once again two innocent children’s lives have been taken by homicidal monsters.