This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.

Israel came to a halt and watched on Wednesday as Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas were buried. We watched Yarden Bibas eulogize his wife and small sons, watched him apologize for not having been able to save them from the invading barbarians, watched him entreat his murdered wife to “guard me so I don’t sink into darkness.”

And the nation wept.

The unforgivable murders of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas encapsulate not only the horror inflicted on Israel by Hamas and its Gazan co-killers on October 7, 2023, but also the undimmed viciousness of those who perpetuated it. And, at the same time, the insistent battle of the people of Israel to reassert our safety and security and right to life in our country.

Some 1,200 people were slaughtered by the terrorists who invaded southern Israel 16 months ago, and we have still barely begun to internalize the scale of that loss. We know but are still processing that whole families were massacred in their homes, that hundreds of people were murdered at an outdoor music festival, that life after life after life after life was brutally extinguished by human beings who have lost any semblance of humanity.

The Bibas family has come, red-headed, unbidden, to represent it all — because we watched the abduction of Shiri from Kibbutz Nir Oz as she desperately sought to protect her small son and her baby; because we saw them still alive in Gaza later that day; because we know her parents were killed on the kibbutz that morning; because we held out hope for 16 months that they had somehow survived and would be returned alive; because Hamas twisted the knife still deeper by returning another body instead of Shiri’s; because we are learning more than even their remaining family can bear for us to learn about the precise, despicable, cold-blooded circumstances of their murders.

But also because the people of Israel on Wednesday connected to them and each other — lining the route of the funeral procession in our masses, gathering in Hostages Square, and watching the unbearable eulogies delivered from a cemetery in southern Israel near the kibbutz. In the self-same southern Israel, that is, where Hamas and its partners murdered and burned and raped 509 days ago, and where Israel and its devastated communities have found the strength and the will to return and start to rebuild. Where Yarden Bibas, bereft father and husband — released less than a month ago after 15 months of terrible captivity to find his worst fears for his precious family confirmed — somehow mustered the courage and strength to stand and bare his soul, to declare his love for them and his heartbreak at the impossibility of their loss.

We have been unable as a nation to even begin to focus adequately on all of those who were murdered 16 months ago in large part because, as of this writing, 63 hostages remain in the hands of the monsters in Gaza, perhaps 24 of them alive, some of them known to be chained, right now, in dark, airless tunnels, being beaten and starved.

And because Hamas is entirely unrepentant and remains hellbent on our destruction. Perhaps I missed it, but even Mousa Abu Marzook, whom The New York Times noted is seen as “one of the more pragmatic figures in Hamas,” while expressing nuanced reservations in an interview with that paper this week regarding the consequences for Gaza of the slaughter his disciples perpetrated, took no issue with the mass murder itself.

Plainly, Israel must do everything in its power to return all the remaining hostages. And plainly, too, Israel must do everything in its power to prevent Hamas and those who share its death cult Islamist ideology from reviving and rearming and finding new and old ways to kill anyone in its path.

Our prime minister, while adamantly refusing to apologize and take full responsibility for failing to ensure the appropriate policies and adequate defenses against Hamas’s overt mass-murder preparations, is wary of proceeding to the second phase of the wobbling ceasefire and terrorist-release deal he had previously approved, under which the remaining hostages would be freed. His main concern appears to be over the requirement to withdraw all remaining IDF forces from Gaza and commit to a permanent ceasefire.

This seems hard to fathom. Yes, Hamas will doubtless seek guarantees from the mediators that Israel will not break the ceasefire if and when it gives up the last of its hostage assets, the leverage through which it aims to ensure its survival and revival. But Hamas will manifestly breach any professed ceasefire commitment — by recruiting and training gunmen, importing and manufacturing arms and rockets, digging tunnels…

The challenge for Israel will not lie in demonstrating to the international community that Hamas is hard at work preparing to try and slaughter Jews again — it has never stopped and will never stop. And the current US administration, unlike its predecessor, has adamantly embraced both of Israel’s core war goals — return all the hostages and destroy Hamas. No, the challenge will be for Israel and its allies to do a better job of eliminating the threat than we’ve managed to do thus far since October 7.

President Donald Trump has his heart set on moving Gazans out of Gaza and turning the emptied territory into a tourism resort, but if this wasn’t being repeatedly proposed as an ostensibly viable vision by the leader of the free world, and hailed by a prime minister apparently wary of crossing him, it would be dismissed as, at best, an unworkable disruption.

How is Israel supposed to “eradicate” Hamas, in the word of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, without inflicting heavy casualties on those Trump calls the “wonderful people” of Gaza before the proposed relocation? Hamas has been massively degraded in 16 months of war, but it is proving capable of recruiting, and its ideology is widely popular. And if Hamas is not eradicated, who is to separate “Hamas” from “Gazans” as the Strip is emptied out?

An empty Gaza apparently constitutes an attractive real estate development opportunity, but the distribution of its indoctrinated population elsewhere would, at the risk of colossal understatement, rather overshadow the economic benefits of Trump’s Gaza Riviera, by causing massive unrest, instability, death and devastation across the region.

Along with a military strategy more incisive, focused and effective than the slow-moving invasion that Israel carried out in the aftermath of October 7, it is the root of the death cult ideology that must be tackled.

It’s not location that’s the problem with Gazans, it’s indoctrination. Not a question of separating Gazans from their blood-soaked land, but separating them from the Hamas mindset. Not “beautiful” housing elsewhere that is needed, President Trump, but beautiful, life-affirming teachers and spiritual leaders.

How delusional does that sound? Utterly, so long, for example, as Trump insists that Qatar is “absolutely trying to help” find a solution to Gaza even as its Al Jazeera television network glorifies Hamas across the Arab world. So long as much of the Arab world is silent, too terrified by its brainwashed masses to stand up publicly against the deadly corrosion of Islamic extremism.

It was not Yarden Bibas, tormented and bereft as he laid his cherished wife and sons to rest, who failed to protect them. And as his sister Ofri said a few days ago, it is not revenge that is needed now. It is wisdom and strategic will — to reestablish our durable capacity to live safely in our land, and to genuinely enable the eradication, worldwide, of the death cult Islamist mindset.

Israel’s leaders owe this to Yarden Bibas. The leadership of the free world owes it to all who sanctify life.