Israelis rush to learn fate of youngest Hamas hostage, taken captive as a baby

Tel Aviv – On lampposts, in store windows and on smartphone screens across Israel, posters show a smiling little red-headed boy hugging a pink elephant.

And now the country is preparing to learn the fate of Kfir Bibas.

The youngest hostage still in captivity in Gaza, Kfir was just under 9 months old when he was kidnapped during the Hamas-led terrorist attack on October 7, 2023. On Saturday, he turned 2 years old, having only never had a birthday outside of captivity.

Along with his 5-year-old brother, Ariel, and his parents, Yarden and Shiri Bibas, Kfir is among 33 hostages expected to be released in the first phase of the ceasefire agreement, according to the Israeli government. But it’s unclear whether the toddler is still alive.

“Not knowing is so hard that sometimes I just want to scream,” he told NBC News earlier this week. “Tell me, even if it’s the worst thing,”

Hugging her two sons as fighters brush aside, Shiri Bibas looked terrified in a video taken near their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz in southern Israel on the day of the Hamas attacks.

Footage of the trio being rounded up by gunmen across the southern Gaza town of Khan later today would prove to be the last known sighting of them.

While all other child hostages were released in exchange for Palestinian prisoners during a week-long ceasefire in November 2023, the Bibas family never emerged from Gaza.

In one of the final days of the brief pause in fighting, Hamas issued a statement claiming that Shiri Bibas and the children had been killed in an Israeli airstrike. He said Marden Bibas was still alive and in captivity.

At the time, the Israeli military said the claim could not be confirmed, but in February 2024 it acknowledged its fears for the family.

“Based on the information available to us, we are very concerned and concerned about the condition and well-being of Shiri and the children,” Adm. Daniel Hagari, the chief spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces.

Now the Bibas family dared to believe that more than a year of agonizing uncertainty might soon end one way or another. “We know it will bring us some kind of certainty, but we are also very afraid,” Ofri Bibas-Levy said of the ceasefire deal. “That could be a good certainty or a bad one.”

The 38-year-old occupational therapist said she held out hope that Shiri Bibas and her two sons might be alive, “but we know the condition in which the hostages are being kept.”

“So for a toddler and a baby, it’s difficult even if they survive the attack that Hamas said they were killed in,” she added. “We are very worried, very, very worried.”

Kfir’s father, Yarden Bibas, was kidnapped separately from his wife and children and held in another part of Gaza, according to hostages who were with him in captivity and since his release.

Nili Margalit, a neighbor of Nir Oz, said she last saw Yarden Bibas on November 30, 2023, just before his release in the first ceasefire.

A Hamas guard ordered her to tell Yarden Bibas that his wife and children were dead, but “I refused to do so,” she said. Instead, she told her captor that “if he wanted to say such a horrible sentence to Yarden, then he is the one who needs to look him in the eye and tell him.”

Hamas informed Muren Bibas and the next day released a video of the distraught father. Ofri Bibas-Levy said: “I said to myself: I’m losing Yarden now because I couldn’t think he could handle and survive this thing they said to him.”

Yarden Bibas is also expected to be released in the first phase of the ceasefire agreement, which took effect Sunday after nearly 15 months of Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip. Health officials in the Palestinian enclave more than 47,000 people have been killed since the start of the war, which began after Hamas launched multi-pronged attacks against Israel, killing 1,200 and taking about 250 people held hostage, according to official accounts.

Bibas-Levy said she thinks about her younger brother constantly: “Every second of every day; I don’t know if he is dead or alive, if he ate today, if he showered, if someone is torturing him, if he is sick, if he is fine. I don’t know anything.

She was speaking at the edge of the so-called Hostage Square, the square in central Tel Aviv where the families of those who have been in Hamas captivity have rallied for 15 months to demand their release.

Many in the crowd alongside her carried stuffed animals in honor of Kfir’s second birthday, an echo of the pink elephant he holds hostage in his poster.

The family had searched the Nir Oz wreck several times in the hope of finding Kfir’s elephant but without success. And then, just days before the most recent ceasefire was signed, he showed up in the corner of a nursery.

“It was definitely very emotional,” Bibas-Levy said. “And I’m hoping for a good sign, maybe.”

This article was originally published on nbcnews.com