As the incomprehensible news about the bodies of Oded Lifshitz and Ariel and Kfir Bibas, as well as the missing body of Shiri Bibas, came out yesterday, many pundits in Israel and beyond have called for revenge. Yet, the Bibas family is not among them.
Kfir and Ariel’s aunt, Ofri Bibas, who is their father Yarden’s sister, shared a message from the family with the world in which she asked not to call for revenge now, but instead to make sure that Shiri and the rest of the hostages, the living and the dead, are returned. She also talked about the feelings of betrayal from the abandonment of her kibbutz on October 7 by Israeli government, and how fresh it all still feels.
Here is the statement in full:
“We were informed yesterday of the devastating news that Ariel and Kfir were murdered in captivity. We waited for the confirmation but this offered no comfort, only immense sadness. My sweet nephews were kidnapped alive from their home and were murdered by a cruel terror organization in captivity. They didn’t deserve such a fate. Our painful journey of the last 16 months isn’t over yet.”
“October 7 is still ongoing,” she continued. “We are still waiting for Shiri and are extremely worried about her. Shiri, Ariel and Kfir were kidnapped alive by a murderous terror organization and it was the State of Israel’s responsibility and commitment to return them alive. There can be no forgiveness for abandoning them on October 7 and there can be no forgiveness for abandoning them in captivity. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, we haven’t even received an apology from you at this painful time.”
“For Ariel, for Kfir and for Yarden, we are not seeking revenge now. We want Shiri and to save the lives of the living hostages and to bring the fallen back for burial,” she stressed.
Ofri then switches from speaking in Hebrew to English to say, “President Trump, I am asking you: Please help Israel and our families in completing this important mission.” Back in Hebrew, she added, “We thank everyone for their support and ask you to respect our family’s privacy.”
The statement ends with an apology to her beloved nephews using the nicknames she always greeted them with: “Lulu and Fir Fir, sorry that I can’t cry over you yet. We are waiting for mommy, Shiri.”
Ofri has been fighting tirelessly for her brother and his family’s return from Gaza, and for her community of Nir Oz, which still has 17 captives held in Gaza along with Shiri.
“Since that Saturday, I got drawn into the action, and with time I understood that that work is protecting me,” she told 102 FM last year. “And when I’m not in it, I’m angrier and more stressed and impatient with my kids, and my guilt is greater, so is the sadness, and that void feels more present, the frustration, and the helplessness, everything — it’s all more felt when I’m not in that work, and so I try to keep myself in it. And that’s why I try to keep myself active. It never goes quite the way I want it go, and I never know if what I’m doing is right. I’m working mostly from my gut, from my heart. We try to work from our head too and think critically, but in the end, the heart and the gut, at least for me, usually win. I just found that that work, and being involved in whatever I can, is what kept me relatively sane in the past year.”
Ofri also revealed how Yarden has been doing since he came back to Israel after spending over 15 months as a hostage in Gaza: “I’ve found in him strengths that I couldn’t believe,” she said. It’s been hard for him, she said, to realize that so many people know his face, and that his sister is giving out press releases.
On her Facebook page this Friday morning, Ofri posted two pictures of herself smiling with her beloved nephews. “I’m sorry Luli, I’m sorry Fir Fir, you didn’t deserve any of this, we will miss you forever, we are not giving up on mommy Shiri,” she wrote.
Shiri’s oldest and only sister, Dana Silberman Sitton, now has to live with more uncertainty after losing her parents, Margit and Yossi Silberman, on October 7. They were murdered in their house in Nir Oz. When Yarden was released, she spoke to the media, saying how her heart felt a bit lighter to see him, and how they both had the same question in their eyes: “Where are Shiri and the kids?” She said then that three-quarters of their heart is still missing and that the family refuses to live with uncertainty, and demands answers. She deserves to know where that final quarter of her heart still is.
As I watched the Israeli news this Thursday in horror, a line kept repeating itself, a quote from a Haim Nachman Bialik poem. The poem was written by Israel’s national poet (and great-uncle of American Jewish actress Mayim Bialik) following the terrible 1903 pogrom in Kishinev, where 49 Jews were killed: “Revenge for/the blood of a little child – has yet been/devised by Satan,” it reads.
The line, many wiser than I have noted, has often been misquoted as a call for revenge for the killing of children, ignoring the context of that final stanza, which calls the ones who call for revenge “accursed,” for the line itself is literal. There is no revenge in the world for the blood of a young child, no revenge in the world that could make up for the death of any child in war or otherwise. No revenge for rambunctious Batman-loving Ariel Bibas, who was just 4, and sweet baby Kfir, killed before he had the chance to turn 1 in November in Gaza, according to the IDF, brutally, not through gunfire but at the hands of the terrorists who kept the boys captive, a fact that Yarden Bibas has asked to share with the world.
The Bibas family is not asking for that impossible revenge. They are asking, instead, to protect life first, the life of their Nir Oz neighbors and the rest of the hostages, and to find Kfir and Ariel’s mom, who deserves to be in Israel along with the rest of her family. The only way to ease their ungraspable suffering is to heed those demands.
Our hearts are with them in this impossible time.
