A cruel succession of images. On Saturday, February 22, the families of six Israeli hostages welcomed with tears of joy the return of their loved ones, held for 16 months in the Gaza Strip and freed by Hamas, while the Bibas family mourned the end of all their hopes. Earlier in the morning, the family had confirmed the death of Shiri Bibas, identified by Tel Aviv coroners after the return of her remains by the Islamist movement, at the end of a nightmarish scenario.

On Thursday, only the bodies of the two young Bibas children, Ariel and Kfir, aged four and eight and a half months at the time of their abduction on October 7, 2023 by armed commandos from the Nir Oz kibbutz, just outside the Palestinian enclave, had been returned in the first return of deceased hostages. Analyses carried out inside a third coffin, supposed to contain the remains of their mother, Shiri, had revealed that it was not her but an "unknown woman" from Gaza. "A mistake," according to Hamas, which returned another coffin on Friday evening.

According to the Israeli army, which said it had passed on this information to US intelligence services, Shiri and her two children were killed by their captors "with their bare hands" and did not die as a result of Israeli bombardments on Gaza, as the Mujahideen Brigades, who were holding them, had claimed back in November 2023.

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