News Analysis
Hamas said it had returned the bodies of Shiri Bibas and her two sons. The Israeli military announced that the boys were murdered in Gaza and that Ms. Bibas’s body was that of someone else.
Reporting from Jerusalem
For 16 months, the smiling faces of Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, Ariel and Kfir, had been slowly receding into the background of Israeli life as their photographs — posted on walls and bus stops soon after the family’s abduction to Gaza in October 2023 — began to fade, tear and peel.
On Friday, the Bibases’ lives and disturbing deaths were swept back to the forefront of Israel’s collective consciousness in such a startling and unsettling way that it set off fresh alarm about the long-term fate of the fragile cease-fire in Gaza. The truce looked set to continue through the weekend, as both sides prepared for another exchange of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners on Saturday, but the turmoil over the Bibas family heightened doubts about an extension.
Early on Friday morning, the Israeli military announced that the body of Ms. Bibas — nominally returned, along with those of her sons, by Hamas to Israel on Thursday — appeared to be that of someone else. And an autopsy of the two boys, aged 4 and 8 months at the time of their abduction, revealed that terrorists killed them in Gaza “with their bare hands,” the military said.
A senior Hamas official, Mousa Abu Marzouq, said in a phone interview that the family was killed in an Israeli airstrike in November 2023, dismissing the accusation that a small militant group that held the hostages, the Mujahideen Brigades, had murdered them. But Mr. Abu Marzouq acknowledged that Ms. Bibas’s body may have been kept in Gaza by mistake, saying that Hamas members were now searching for her remains in a place where the family had been buried alongside Palestinians.
Neither side’s account could be independently verified.
By Friday night, Mr. Marzouq and two other Hamas officials said the group had found and delivered to the Red Cross the body of another woman, which it believed belonged to Ms. Bibas. The Red Cross confirmed the receipt of remains from Hamas, but it was not immediately clear if they were those of Ms. Bibas.
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