TEL AVIV — On lampposts, in shop windows and on smartphone screens across Israel, posters show a smiling, red-headed child holding a pink elephant.
And now Malik Kafir is trying to learn the fate of Bibas.
The youngest hostage in Gaza is still being held in Kfir. He was just shy of 9 months old when he was kidnapped on October 7, 2023, during a Hamas-led terrorist attack. On Saturday, he turned 2, a birthday he’s never known outside of prison.
Along with his 5-year-old brother, Ariel, and his parents, Yarden and Sherry Bibas, Kafir is among 33 hostages to be released during the first phase of the ceasefire agreement, according to the Israeli government. But it is not clear if the child is still alive.
“Not knowing is so hard that sometimes I just want to scream,” Kefir’s aunt, Afri Bibas Levy, told NBC News earlier this week. “Just tell me, even if it’s the worst thing,”
Holding her two sons, at the behest of fighters, Sherri Bibas looks terrified in a video taken near her home in Kibbutz Nir Oz in southern Israel on the day of the Hamas attacks.
Footage of the trio being driven into a herd of gunmen through the southern Gaza city of Khan Yunis later that day would prove to be their last known encounter.
While all other child hostages were released in exchange for Palestinian prisoners during a week-long ceasefire in November 2023, Bibas’s family never left Gaza.
On one of the last days of a brief lull in fighting, Hamas released a statement claiming that Shiri Bibas and the children had been killed in an Israeli airstrike. It said that Jordan Bibas is still alive and in prison.
At the time, Israel’s military said the claim could not be verified, but in February 2024 it acknowledged its concerns for the family.
“Based on the information available to us, we are very concerned and concerned about the condition and well-being of Sherry and the children,” Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, chief spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, told a news conference.
Now, the Bibas family dares to believe that more than a year of agonizing uncertainty will soon end somehow. “We know we will get some kind of certainty, but we are also very scared,” Afri Bibas Levy said of the ceasefire agreement. “It can be a good belief or a bad one.”
The 38-year-old occupational therapist said she still hoped Sherry Bibas and her two sons could survive, “but we know the conditions the hostages are being held in.”
“So for a toddler and a baby, it’s difficult even if they survive the attack in which Hamas said they were killed,” he added. “We are very worried, very, very worried.”
Kfir’s father, Yarden Bibas, was kidnapped, separated from his wife and children and held in a different part of Gaza, according to hostages who were held with him and have since been released.
Nellie Margalit, a Neir Oz neighbor, said she last saw Yarden Bebas on November 30, 2023, just before he was released in the first truce.
A Hamas bodyguard ordered him to tell Yorden Bibas that his wife and children were dead, but he said, “I refused to do so. Instead he told his captor that “if he wants to say such a horrible thing to Yarden, he’s the one who has to look him in the eye and tell him.”
Hamas notified Jordan Bibas and the next day released a video of the distraught father. Afri Bibas Levy said: “I thought: I’m losing Yarden now because I couldn’t imagine that he would be able to endure and survive what they told him.”
Yordon Bibas is also to be released in the first phase of a ceasefire agreement, which came into effect on Sunday after Israel’s nearly 15-month military campaign in the Gaza Strip. Health officials in the Palestinian enclave say more than 47,000 people have been killed since the start of the war, which began after a series of attacks by Hamas on Israel, with 1,200 dead and about 250 injured, according to official figures. People were taken hostage.
Bibas-Levy said she thinks about her little brother constantly, “every second of every day; I don’t know if he’s dead or alive, if he’s eaten today, if he’s taken a bath, If someone is torturing him, if he is sick, if he is well, I don’t know anything.”
She was speaking on the edge of the so-called Hostage Square, a plaza in central Tel Aviv where families of Hamas prisoners have been holding rallies demanding their release for 15 months.
Many in the crowd with him were carrying stuffed animals in honor of Kafir’s second birthday, echoing the pink elephant he holds in his hostage poster.
The family searched the wreckage of Nir Oz several times, hoping to find the Kaffir elephant, but without success. And then, a few days before the recent armistice was signed, it landed in the corner of the nursery.
“It was really emotional,” Bibas-Levy said. “And hopefully a good sign, maybe.”
