Hamas’s final act of depravity against the Bibas family

So Hamas has committed yet another act of depravity against the Bibas family. It said Shiri Bibas was in one of those four coffins it put on grim display in Gaza yesterday before handing them over to the Red Cross. But she wasn’t. It was the remains of some unknown person that Hamas passed off as the mother-of-two whose return the whole of Israel has been crying out for. Truly, is there no end to the cynicism and savagery of these terrorists?

Israel says forensic testing has confirmed that two of the coffins contained the bodies of the Bibas children: Ariel, who was four when he was kidnapped, and Kfir, who was just nine months old. A third coffin contained the remains of the 84-year-old Israeli peace activist Oded Lifschitz.

But the tests revealed that the fourth body is not Shiri’s. It seems it is not any of the hostages who were seized during Hamas’s October 7 pogrom. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu says it looks like Hamas “put the body of a Gazan woman in a coffin.”

The callousness of Hamas chills the blood. To shove a deceased person into a black box and tell the world “This is Shiri Bibas” is moral degeneracy taken to new, unfathomed depths.

It feels like the sickest of power plays, as though Hamas is cherishing, for one last time, its power of torment over the Bibas family. Not content with stealing and killing Shiri and her two tiny sons, now Hamas mocks their mourning family by sending them the remains of a stranger. Just imagine the anguish of dad Yarden, who himself survived 484 days in the captivity of these neo-fascists: he can now bury his children but not his wife.

Hamas says there was a “mix-up.” Its spokesman Ismail al-Thwabta said on X that Shiri’s remains must have got mixed up with other bodies in the rubble of a bombed-out building. (Hamas says the family was killed in an Israeli airstrike; Israel disputes this.)

That Hamas thinks it can just say “Oops” about something as despicable as sending a stranger’s body to a grief-stricken nation and family sums up its moral wretchedness. The fact is, Hamas told the world that the coffin contained the remains of Shiri Bibas. It either knew her remains were not in the coffin or it was not entirely sure. Either way, what it now calls a “mix-up” was in truth yet more cruel and unusual punishment visited on a young family whose only “crime” is that they were Jews in Israel.

What Hamas has done to the Bibas family almost defies belief. History will record it as one of the most barbarous persecutions of innocents in the early 21st century. It has been humiliation upon humiliation.

First, they were kidnapped, a mother and her infants seized from their home by a mob of antisemites. Then they were made into prisoners. Then they perished, and it matters not one iota whether that was as a result of an Israeli airstrike or at the bloody hands of a Hamas killer — either way, Hamas bears every bit of responsibility for the death of this family.

Then their coffins — well, the coffins of little Ariel and Kfir — were put on public display before a heaving mob. And now we discover that mum Shiri was not among those bodies that Hamas so grossly invited the world to gawp at. She remains lost in that hell she was dragged to with her babies. The consequences could be severe: Israel says Hamas’s failure to return Shiri’s remains is a violation of the ceasefire — “a violation of the utmost severity,” in fact. It is. If the ceasefire now falters, it will be down to the evil of Hamas.

Once again that question remains: where are the West’s progressive voices? Where is their condemnation of this fascistic persecution of a young family of Jews? Where are the feminists? A woman dragged from her home, with her children, by a mob of tooled-up racist men, and there has been silence from the #MeToo brigade. Perhaps they’ve been too busy fighting for their right to quaff wine with thespians and aristocrats at the Garrick Club to ask, just one time, “Where is Shiri Bibas?”.

The silence of the West’s progressives in response to Hamas’s taunting and torture of Jews feels profoundly unsettling. Hamas’s butchery, tragically, is to be expected — it’s the western left’s moral abandonment of Hamas’s victims that truly startles and horrifies. “Where is Shiri?” ought to be the cry of every decent person right now.