- Matti Friedman: The Family that Never Came Home
For Israelis, October 7 is a slow-release catastrophe. Hamas has bargained not just over every Israeli hostage and corpse, but also over scraps of information about their fate, meaning that the precise death toll from the war’s first day is still not clear. Some of those we hoped were still alive turn out to have been dead from the very beginning—like Shlomo Mantzour, a grandfather taken at age 85 and thought to be the oldest Israeli hostage until last week, when new information revealed he was killed 16 months ago.
No captives have focused public sentiment like the Bibas children, the youngest Israeli hostages. Footage from October 7 showed a terrified Shiri Bibas cradling a baby and a toddler as they were taken at gunpoint from their home. The two redheads quickly became symbols of the 250 Israelis taken hostage—icons not just of the inhumanity of the Palestinians who kidnapped and murdered civilians and celebrated this barbarism as a victory, but of the unthinkable weakness of the Israeli state that allowed this to happen.
After their capture, the Israeli military said Shiri and the children were in the hands of a small and previously unknown Gazan faction. Video footage showed the children’s father, Yarden, covered in blood on the back of a motorcycle, surrounded by dozens of men as he was taken away separately. He survived 15 months in captivity and was recently returned as part of the current ceasefire deal.
Later, another video surfaced showing Shiri and the children being herded into Gaza by a half-dozen men. This was the last glimpse of them.
7. Seth Mandel: The Meaning of Kfir Bibas
To be Jewish has meant experiencing a crushing disappointment in the world since the Hamas attacks that started this war. A stray line in one of the many articles about the Bibas family today unintentionally offers a crystal clear explanation for that disappointment. “For many Israelis,” The New York Times writes, “the story of the Bibas family has become a symbol of the brutality of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack.”
That sentence is accurate. But in another universe, one where the “international community” cares a whit for justice and human decency, the sentence would read this way: “For everyone, the story of the Bibas family has become a symbol of the brutality of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack.”
In such a world, the faces of the Bibas children would be everywhere at all times. In the world in which we live, by contrast, posters with those faces get torn down from bulletin boards. In the kind of world we hope to deserve to inhabit, no children’s charity or NGO would go a day without drawing attention to Kfir and Ariel and the monsters who stole them.
16. Ericka Andersen: The Devastation of Leftover Embryos
23. Franciscan University of Steubenville opens maternity home for students
25. Catholic-backed prison nursery offers incarcerated moms ‘family-oriented’ space for babies
- Rev. Samuel Rodriquez: How Churches are Helping Southern California Recover From the Fires
The California Church is in it for the long haul. We are committed to seeing our communities rebuilt and our lives restored. We stand shoulder to shoulder in the hard work, refusing to give up hope and refusing to leave.