10-month-old boy in Hamas hands: A baby as leverage

In recent days, dozens of women and children have been released from Hamas’s hands. But the youngest hostage, a baby just 10 months old, was not there yet. Little Kfir Bibas has become a symbol of Hamas’ brutality throughout Israel.

A rally in Tel Aviv. People form a large circle, hold up pictures and posters of a red-haired baby and chant: “We want her home.” And then they count down from three.

Dozens of orange balloons rise into the air. The color was deliberately chosen. It is the hair color of Kfir Bibas. The baby, just 10 months old, is the youngest child in Hamas’ hands.

The little redhead has become a symbol of Hamas’ brutality throughout Israel. Since Friday, dozens of women, young people and children have been released by the terrorists. But the youngest hostage, little Kfir, wasn’t there yet.

Desperate relatives

Ifat Seiler, the cousin of Shiri Bibas, little Kfir’s mother, is desperate and upset. “We are always told that the little one is on the list. As if we were talking about a shopping list: milk, eggs, bread and your families who are being held captive in the Gaza Strip,” she complains.

“The people who abandoned my family there are now waging war. And no one can tell me where they are.” They should have been here after four days, says Seiler. “After just a week, an agreement should have been reached about an exchange. I saw the video of Shiri with the children, but from the moment it was recorded, I don’t know what happened to them.”

The video that Ifat Seiler is referring to shows the moment of the kidnapping on October 7th. The mother Shirin holds the little baby Kfir and his four-year-old brother Ariel wrapped in a blanket. Armed terrorists shout at them in Arabic. The children are fidgeting, the mother is in a panic. Nobody will do anything to her, says a terrorist. “She has children,” says another. Since then there has been no sign of life from the Bibas family, the two children, the two parents.

“Our personal Schindler’s List”

Yossi Schneider, also a cousin of his mother, simply cannot understand so much of Hamas’ brutality and inhumanity.

“It’s like our personal Schindler’s List,” says Schneider. “Every day we wait to see who will be elected to return and who won’t. So, who will escape death and who won’t. I don’t understand what Hamas was thinking. Who were they afraid of? What would they have “What can I do to them?”

Israel’s military is making public pressure

Because: Hamas announced a few days ago that the family was now in the hands of another militant terrorist group in the Gaza Strip. This led to the Israeli military naming the family in public statements in the hope of increasing pressure on Hamas.

Military spokesman Daniel Hagari said “responsibility for all hostages, including the Bibas family, who are in the control of other groups in the Gaza Strip, lies entirely with Hamas.”

Perfidious psychological war by Hamas

The little redhead Kfir has now spent almost a fifth of his life held hostage by Hamas. It is unclear whether he is still alive. Yesterday, Hamas reported that the baby had been killed along with his parents in an Israeli military airstrike in Khan Younis.

We don’t know whether that’s true. It could be part of Hamas’ perfidious psychological war on the hostages to drive up the price of an exchange. A psychological war by Hamas that doesn’t stop even at 10-month-old babies.