TEL AVIV – On lampposts, in shop windows and on smartphone screens across Israel, the posters show a smiling, red-haired baby boy holding a pink elephant.
And now the country is preparing for the fate of Kfir Bibas.
Kfir, the youngest hostage still in captivity in Gaza, was just 9 months old when he was kidnapped during the Hamas-led terrorist attack on October 7, 2023. He turned 2 on Saturday, having never known a birthday outside 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 during the first phase of the ceasefire, according to the Israeli government. But it is unclear whether the toddler is still alive.
Kfir Bibas, who was taken hostage from Kibbutz Nir-Oz when he was nine months old.
“Not knowing is so hard that sometimes I just want to scream,” Ofri Bibas-Levy, Kfir’s aunt, told NBC News earlier this week. “Just tell me, even if it’s the worst”
Shiri Bibas held her two sons as fighters barked orders and looked terrified in a video taken near their home in kibbutz Nir Oz in southern Israel on the day of the Hamas attacks.
Images of the trio being driven by gunmen through the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis later that day 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 left Gaza.
On one of the last days of the brief lull in fighting, Hamas released a statement claiming that Shiri Bibas and the children had been killed in an Israeli airstrike. It said Yarden 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.
Video shows the kidnapping of Shiri Silberman-Bibas and her children.
“Based on the information available to us, we are very concerned about the condition and well-being of Shiri and the children,” Admiral Daniel Hagari, chief spokesman for the Israeli army, told a news conference.
Now the Bibas family dares to believe that one way or another, more than a year of painful uncertainty will soon come to an end. “We know it will bring us some certainty, but we are also very afraid,” Ofri Bibas-Levy said of the ceasefire. “It can be a good security or a bad one.”
The 38-year-old occupational therapist said she still hoped Shiri Bibas and her two sons were still alive, “but we know the condition in which the hostages are being held.”
“So for a toddler and a baby it is difficult even if they survived the attack that Hamas says killed them,” she added. “We are very concerned, very concerned.”
Kfir’s father, Yarden Bibas, was kidnapped separately from his wife and children and held in another part of Gaza, according to hostages in his custody who have since been released.
Nili Margalit, a neighbor in Nir Oz, said she last saw Yarden Bibas on November 30, 2023, just before she was released during the first ceasefire.
A Hamas guard ordered her to tell Yarden Bibas that his wife and children were dead, but “I refused to do that,” she said. Instead, she told her captor that “if he wanted to say such a terrible sentence to Yarden, he is the one who should look him in the eye and tell him.”
Hamas notified Yarden Bibas and released a video of the distraught father the next day. Ofri Bibas-Levy said: “I thought, I’m losing Yarden now because I couldn’t think he could put up with this thing they were telling him and survive.”
Yarden, Ariel, Shiri, Kfir Bibas.
Yarden Bibas will also be released in the first phase of the ceasefire, which came into effect on Sunday after nearly 15 months of Israeli military campaign in the Gaza Strip. Health officials in the Palestinian enclave have killed more than 47,000 people since the start of the war, which began after Hamas launched multiple attacks on Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostage, according to official figures.
Bibas-Levy said she thinks about her younger brother constantly, “every second of every day; I don’t know if he’s dead or alive, if he ate today, if he showered, if someone is torturing him, if he’s sick, if he’s okay. I don’t know anything.”
She spoke on the edge of the so-called Hostage Square, the square in central Tel Aviv where families of those held in Hamas captivity have gathered for 15 months to demand their release.
Many in the crowd next to her carried stuffed animals in honor of Kfir’s second birthday, an echo of the pink elephant he holds in his hostage poster.
The family had searched the wreck of Nir Oz many times in the hope of finding Kfir’s elephant, but without success. And then, just days before the latest ceasefire was signed, it turned up in the corner of a child’s room.
“It was really emotional,” Bibas-Levy said. “And hopefully a good sign, maybe.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
