Khan Younis, Gaza Strip — Hamas released four bodies on Thursday, which Israeli officials said included two young children who have long been feared dead and had come to embody the nation’s agony following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israel. Their mother was said to have been returned with them, but Israeli forces said hours later that another person’s remains were released instead.
The remains were said to be those of Shiri Bibas and her two children, Ariel and Kfir, as well as Oded Lifshitz, who was 83 when he was abducted. Kfir, who was 9 months old when he was taken, was the youngest of all the captives. Hamas has said all four were killed along with their guards in Israeli airstrikes.
In a social media post early Friday morning, the Israel Defense Forces said that Ariel and Kfir’s remains were returned, but not their mother’s. “During the identification process, it was determined that the additional body received is not that of Shiri Bibas, and no match was found for any other hostage. This is an anonymous, unidentified body,” the IDF said.
Ali Jadallah/Anadolu/Getty
The militants displayed four black caskets on a stage surrounded by banners, including a large one depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a vampire, as Red Cross vehicles arrived at the scene in the Gaza Strip.
The fighters then carried the caskets over to Red Cross vehicles, where staffers in red vests covered them in white sheets before placing them inside. Each casket had a picture fixed to the front bearing the image of the slain hostage whose remains were purportedly inside.
The Red Cross convoy headed back to Israel, where authorities were carrying out a formal identification process on the remains using DNA, which was expected to take up to two days. A statement from the Lifshitz family, however, shared by the Hostages Families Forum, said they had “received with deep sorrow the official and bitter news confirming the identification of our beloved Oded’s body.”
“We had hoped and prayed so much for a different outcome. Now we can mourn the husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather who has been missing from us since October 7,” the family said, adding that their “healing process will begin now and will not end until the last hostage is returned.”
Oded Balilty / AP
Thousands of people, including large numbers of masked and armed fighters from Hamas and other factions, gathered at the handover site on the outskirts of the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis.
“Every home in Israel bows its head today. We bow our heads for the heavy loss of our four hostages,” Netanyahu said in a statement. “The four coffins of our loved ones oblige us more than ever to promise, to swear, that what happened on October 7 will never happen again.”
Israeli channels did not broadcast the handover. In Hostage Square in Tel Aviv, where Israelis have gathered to watch the release of living hostages, a large screen showed a compilation of photos and videos of Lifshitz and the Bibas family, including a chuckling baby Kfir and the family dressed up in Batman costumes. Yarden Bibas, the children’s father, was not with his family on Oct. 7, but was taken separately. He was released earlier this month after 16 months in captivity.
Dozens of residents of Kibbutz Nir Oz, from which the four slain hostages released on Thursday were kidnapped, gathered to wave Israeli flags outside of their temporary home an hour north of the ravaged kibbutz.
Israelis have celebrated the return of 24 living hostages in recent weeks under a tenuous ceasefire that paused over 15 months of war. But the handover on Thursday will provide a grim reminder of those who died in captivity as the talks leading up to the truce dragged on for over a year.
It could also provide impetus for negotiations on the second stage of the ceasefire that have hardly begun. The first phase is set to end at the beginning of March.
Kfir Bibas was just 9 months old, a red-headed infant with a toothless smile, when militants stormed into the family’s home on Oct. 7, 2023. His brother Ariel was 4. Video shot that day showed a terrified Shiri swaddling the two boys as militants led them into Gaza.
Ariel Schalit/AP
Relatives in Israel have clung to hope, marking Kfir’s first and second birthdays and his brother’s fifth. The Bibas family said in a statement Wednesday that it would wait for “identification procedures” before acknowledging that their loved ones were dead.
Supporters throughout Israel have worn orange in solidarity with the family — a reference to two boys’ red hair — and a popular children’s song was written in their honor.
Like the Bibas family, Oded Lifshitz was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz, along with his wife Yocheved, who was freed during a weeklong ceasefire in November 2023. Oded was a journalist who campaigned for the recognition of Palestinian rights and peace between Arabs and Jews.
Hamas-led militants abducted 251 hostages, including some 30 children, in the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, in which they also killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians.
More than half the hostages, and most of the women and children, have been released in ceasefire agreements or other deals. Israeli forces have rescued eight and have recovered dozens of bodies of people killed in the initial attack or who died in captivity.
Hamas is set to free six living hostages on Saturday in exchange for hundreds more Palestinian prisoners, and says it will release four more bodies next week, completing the ceasefire’s first phase. That will leave the militants with some 60 hostages, all men, around half of whom are believed to be dead.
Hamas has said it won’t release the remaining captives without a lasting ceasefire and a full Israeli withdrawal. Netanyahu, with the full backing of the Trump administration, says he is committed to destroying Hamas’ military and governing capacities and returning all the hostages, goals widely seen as mutually exclusive.
Mr. Trump’s proposal to remove some 2 million Palestinians from Gaza so the U.S. can own and rebuild it, which has been welcomed by Netanyahu but universally rejected by Palestinians and Arab countries, has thrown the ceasefire into further doubt.
Hamas could be reluctant to free more hostages if it believes the war will resume with the goal of annihilating the group or forcibly transferring Gaza’s population.
Israel’s military offensive killed over 48,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its records. Israel says it has killed over 17,000 fighters, without providing evidence.
The offensive destroyed vast areas of Gaza, reducing entire neighborhoods to fields of rubble and bombed-out buildings. At its height, the war displaced 90% of Gaza’s population. Many have returned to their homes to find nothing left and no way of rebuilding.
