2024-01-19 03:00:00
01/18/2024January 18, 2024
Baby Kfir Bibas turns one year old and is still being held hostage by Hamas
A protester calls for the release of Kfir Bibas (in the photo), who is held hostage by the radical Islamic organization Hamas, which carried out brutal attacks once morest civilians in Israel, on October 7, 2023. Image: Athit Perawongmetha/REUTERS
Kfir Bibas, the youngest Hamas hostage, celebrates one year in captivity this January 18 following being kidnapped in Israel, on October 7, in the Nir Oz kibbutz with his parents, Yarden and Shiri, and his brother Ariel, 4 years old. All of them are still being held in the Gaza Strip with no evidence as to whether they are dead or alive.
Kfir, who was kidnapped before he was nine months old, and his brother Ariel, are the only children still kidnapped inside the enclave following 104 days of war, since October 7, when Hamas committed a brutal attack on Israeli soil that left more of 1,200 dead and 240 hostages.
“It’s a lifetime for a baby,” Yosi Shnaider, Shiri’s cousin and spokesman for the Bibas family, said in statements regarding the time Kfir has spent kidnapped.
“The saddest birthday in the world,” announced today The Forum of Relatives of Hostages and Missing Persons, which organized this followingnoon in Tel Aviv, an event in tribute to Kfir to demand his release.
The armed wing of Hamas, the al Qasam Brigades, announced on November 29 that Shiri Silberman Bibas, 32 years old and of Argentine origin, and her two sons Ariel and Kfir, had died in a bombing by the Israeli Army on the Strip. but they did not provide any evidence in this regard.
A few days later, they released a video of 34-year-old Yarden Bibas – who was apparently spending his captivity separated from the rest of his family – in which he asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to end the war so he might reunite with his wife and children.
“Somehow I can feel that they’re still alive. I can’t explain it, but that’s what I feel. I have no choice,” Shnaider said.
Almost two months later, the Israeli Army has not been able to verify this information, something that has happened with other hostages that the Islamist militias have left for dead, which is why no one from the Argentine-Israeli Bibas family appears on the list of the 27. hostages who are believed to have died in captivity of the 136 who still remain in the Strip.
However, the fact that the mother and two minors were not released during the week-long truce in November raised suspicions regarding whether or not they were alive. There was also speculation that they were in the hands of other Islamist groups with whom Hamas had been unable to establish contact.
In that truce, between November 24 and 30, Hamas released all the minors it held hostage, most of them with their mothers, among the total of 105 hostages who were given in exchange for the release of 240 Palestinian prisoners. (efe, ape/ cp).
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