Last week, 5-year-old Yoav Avital got the devastating news that his friend isn’t coming back.
For four years, since they were together at their kibbutz’s baby room, Yoav has been friends with a sweet, rambunctious boy named Ariel Bibas. Since Ariel was taken hostage on October 7 from Nir Oz, Yoav’s been hoping and scheming for ways to help him return — like any toddler, he has ideas for how to make things happen.
In one attempt, he asked his mother Yamit to write him a letter to give to their preschool teacher. He told her to write: “I want to draw you Batman and all the heroes that fly so that you’ll feel like flying above Gaza. You’ll fight the bad guys with a bow and arrow. And then you’ll come back to us and be at preschool with us. I hope you buy sweets and a cape. I miss you.”
When he heard other loved ones of hostages release message over the radio, he did the same for his friend — asking him to fly from Gaza to Carmei Gat, where the Nir Oz community now lives.
In Purim of last year, he asked to put aside a Batman costume for Ariel — his favorite superhero. When his friend didn’t come to pick it up, Yoav decided to don it himself while pretending to fly over to Gaza to save his friend.
“Maybe they like them too much?” he mused when Ariel and his brother Kfir, along with their mother Shiri, didn’t get released in the first hostage release deal and with every beat of the current one. Ariel, after all, was so funny and full of energy; maybe the terrorists just wanted to spend more time with him.
At a rally in Carmei Gat, Yamit recalled how this week, Yoav’s father, Benny, who lost his twin brother, Gil Avital, on October 7, was holding a picture of little Ariel in his hand.
Yoav told his dad, “He’s not my friend anymore, he’s dead.” Devastated, he fell asleep on the couch, too overwhelmed to deal with all the grief in the room. When he woke up, he started screaming, “Ariel is not dead, he’s not! He’s alive! He’s just in his room and you don’t know the number of the room!”
Yoav now feels unsafe and unprotected in the world, his mom shared, knowing that a baby and a little boy were murdered.
Yoav, Yamit shared in another interview, is still making plans to rescue. Israel has really smart people, he told his mother, so maybe they can invent a potion to bring the boys back to life. He hears the Hebrew word for fallen, “chalal,” which is the same word as the Hebrew word for outer space. He imagines his friend as an astronaut, still living. He hears that his friend is in a coffin, “aron,” the Hebrew word for closet, too, and reminds his mom that you can’t be dead if you can stand up in a closet. She has to explain to him, again and again, what these words really mean — that the dead don’t come back. She had to have the same conversation when his uncle died, but this time, it just doesn’t make any sense to Yoav.
“Can I at least see him one more time?” she recalls him asking through tears. All she can tell him is that he can meet him again in his dreams. There, she tells her youngest child, he can “hug him tight, play superheroes and go wild in the pool, look for bugs and plants and tell him how he is and ask how they are.”
The other night, Yamit was reading her son a story when he stopped her in the middle, saying, “I can’t stop thinking about Ariel, my heart hurts too much.”
The Avitals and the Bibases were neighbors, and they were constantly going back and forth between their houses, meeting at the cafeteria and the pool. In a radio interview, Yamit remembered seeing Ariel so wild and sweet, winning over everyone. In the days after Shiri’s death was announced, Yamit looked over at their old correspondences, mutually admiring the sweetness of their boys. She admired how Shiri handled motherhood, including “the way she would look over them, educate them, take them with her to work if she wasn’t done.”
“You will always be in my memory a lioness mom. Your story should have ended differently,” she shared.
This Tuesday, the Nir Oz community is burying their beloved Oded Lifshitz, whose body came back with the boys. Tomorrow, the country will join the Bibas family, walking with flags and yellow ribbons to accompany them to their final resting place along with their loved ones, who will mourn them in a private ceremony. Our hearts break for all those in mourning, and for little Yoav, too.
