Debunking The Israeli Bibas Family Deception

Israel Is Weaponizing The Tragic Fate Of The Bibas Hostages To Push For More War.

Pictured Above: A Painting In Israel Of The Deceased Members Of The Bibas Family.

As I wrote about in my last article, the Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu is weaponizing the tragic fate of the Bibas family in order to manufacture consent for restarting the genocide in Gaza.

For context, the Bibas family is an Israeli family who were taken hostage by Hamas on October 7th.

The family’s mother Shiri Bibas along with her two young children Ariel and Kfir Bibas were killed while in captivity.

Hamas has said that they were killed in an Israeli air strike while the Israeli government has stated -without evidence- that they were killed by Hamas “with their bare hands”.

At the time, a spokesman for the Bibas family disputed these allegations saying “Any publication of details is against the family’s wishes” and that “the family has not received any such details from official sources”.

Bibas Family Disputes Israeli Government Claim

Now ,an official letter sent to the Israeli government from the Bibas family --\ published by the independent news outlet “The Grayzone”-proves that the family is fully rejecting the Israeli government’s weaponization of the family’s tragedy.

The letter states that “the (Bibas) family continues to receive, surprisingly, repeated inquiries from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the National Information System” despite the fact that the “report from the Institute of Forensic Medicine” on the family death has yet to be received.

The letter argued that these inquiries of details were being made to the family “with the aim of satisfying the public's voyeuristic instinct”.

In other words, the Israeli government is making evidence-free assertions about how the Bibas mother and children died before the family has even received an official forensics report on it.

The letter goes on to accuse the Israeli government of weaponizing the family tragedy for political reasons and distributing unwanted details about the deaths stating :

we ask once again and in every language of request that all parties who have an interest in the matter be instructed, especially at this difficult time, not to contact the family, nor to speak with any professional party entrusted with conducting the examinations regarding the circumstances of the murder and the condition of the deceased, and this before the Bibas family holds the funeral and the oath-taking, receives the report from the Institute of Forensic Medicine, which will be submitted for further review, studies the report, in all its details, and decides which details will be distributed.

The letter further goes on to dispute false “news” stories that have been decimated about the family members’ deaths saying:

We further request that all necessary measures be taken to prevent the dissemination of publications and "news" regarding the circumstances of the murder of the Bibas family members, regarding their condition and regarding the examinations.

The letter ends by stating that the family has been through “harassment and attacks on their privacy and dignity” from “Internal state agencies, media agencies and private entities” who want to weaponize the family’s death. As the letter states:

It is unreasonable, let alone appropriate, that after the hardships that the Bibas family has gone through, they should be forced to deal with harassment and attacks on their privacy and dignity, at their most difficult time, from Internal state agencies, media agencies and private entities.

Shady Forensics

The investigation -by journalists Max Blumenthal and Wyatt Reed in the Grazyone- on this letter dug into the history of Dr. Chen Kugel- the Israeli “forensics expert” who claimed the Bibas family were killed by Hamas- and found he had a long history of doing propaganda for the Israeli government.

He had previously told the Economist that he had seen “the burnt, headless bodies of babies” on October 7th, a claim debunked by Israeli Social Security data which found that one baby was killed on October 7th “10-month-old Mila Cohen” who was “shot and killed at Kibbutz Beeri.”

Blumenthal and Reed also noted that Kugel had also “attempted to shield an Israeli soldier from prosecution by claiming during the trial that the exit wound on a 17-year-old Palestinian boy who’d been shot dead during a protest was inconsistent with the firing position of the defendant” only to be disproven when “the soldier later acknowledged “accidentally” firing a live round”.

Open Source Research Disputes Israeli Claims

Adar Weinreb, a former IDF soldier turned open source researcher, looked into the Bibas case and found they were most likely to have been killed in an Israeli strike.

Weinreb noted that there have recently been Israeli whistleblowers who exposed “Israel’s strategy of bombing the homes of combatants, even when intelligence suggested hostages might be present.”

The whistleblowers noted that there were “dozens of Israeli airstrikes that likely endangered or killed hostages”.

Weinreb also noted that “Israel has officially admitted to killing nine hostages in airstrikes” and that “the case of (the hostage) Noa Marciano strongly suggests she was also killed by an Israeli airstrike, despite Israel’s attempt to suggest otherwise”.

He also noted that “in the case of the nine hostages Israel admitted to killing, the circumstances made it significantly harder to maintain an alternative narrative” while in the Bibas family killings “far fewer people had direct knowledge of the circumstances of their deaths” which “gives Israel the flexibility to craft whichever narrative was most convenient”.

Weinreb also noted that Hamas, no matter one’s opinion of them, rarely targets young children. He noted that of the death count on October 7th there were ,

12 Children under 13 killed:, accounting for 3.63% of civilian deaths. By comparison, children under 13 make up 25.5% of Israel’s total population, meaning they were killed at a rate approximately seven times lower than their share of the population.

Weinreb concluded that:

Given Israel’s history of misleading forensic reports, its established pattern of killing hostages in airstrikes, and the overwhelming lack of precedent for Islamist militants executing young children, I believe the most plausible explanation, by a significant margin, is that they were killed in an Israeli airstrike

This does not mean Hamas is fully off the hook, as Weinreb noted “Taking children hostage is a war crime and is absolutely unjustifiable.”

However, what it does show is that Israel most likely killed the Bibas family in an air strike and are now constructing a pro-war propaganda narrative against the family’s wishes.

Part Of A Larger Israeli Strategy

In 2010, the U.S. government-connected private intelligence firm “Stratford” noted that Israel was intentionally trying to sabotage peace agreements with Palestinians in order to justify their brutal blockade on Gaza.

The intelligence assessment stated that

While Israel has agreed to engage in negotiations with the Palestinians,
It seeks to force the failure of these negotiations by making unrealistic demands and then blame that failure on the Palestinians' unwillingness to meet those demands.

Stratford noted that this was done to “appease U.S. and international
pressure” against the blockade on Gaza “while showing the world that Israel's attempts at peace are being sabotaged by Palestinian intransigence.”

Since the ceasefire in Gaza began, the veteran award-winning journalist Jeremy Scahill has been documenting Netanyahu’s attempts to “force the failure” of the current ceasefire.

Scahill noted that:

Since the ceasefire officially went into effect on January 19, Israel has continued to carry out targeted attacks inside the Gaza Strip on an almost daily basis. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, more than 110 Palestinians have been killed (in these strikes).

Scahill also noted that:

Netanyahu has reiterated that one of Israel’s remaining central goals in Gaza is the total elimination of Hamas, and several of Trump’s advisors have said the U.S. supports that objective. On a practical level, experts say that destroying Hamas as a movement would be impossible even if Israel assassinates its entire leadership.

He also wrote that

Hamas has accused Israel of playing “dirty games” by slowing or blocking the agreed upon delivery of aid into the Gaza Strip, including food, medicine, tents, generators and other necessities, as well as continuing to kill Palestinians in Gaza.

This accusation from Hamas is something that multiple Israeli officials have acknowledged. In a New York Times report on the ceasefire deal, they wrote:

The current standoff stems in part from Hamas’s accusation that Israel has not upheld its promises for the first phase of the cease-fire. Israel was required to send hundreds of thousands of tents into Gaza, a promise that Hamas says Israel has not kept.

Three Israeli officials and two mediators, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, said that Hamas’s claims were accurate.

The mainstream Israeli newspaper Maariv also admitted that Hamas had not violated the ceasefire agreement writing “The defense establishment and the IDF say that so far the terrorist organization (Hamas) has not violated the (ceasefire) agreement”.

In a follow-up article, Scahill noted that Israel was using the fate of the Bibas family as a part of their larger campaign to sabotage the ceasefire agreement, writing

Netanyahu has also used the events that unfolded last week surrounding the return of the bodies of Israeli captive Shiri Bibas and her two small children to justify a potential end to the deal. Ariel and Kfir were 4 years and 9 months old when fighters from the Mujahideen Brigades—another Palestinian armed group—took them back to Gaza on October 7. It has been clear for over a year that Netanyahu and his supporters have been using the family as an emotional weapon to stoke Israeli anger. Since November 2023, Hamas has maintained that the three were killed in an Israeli airstrike, but Israeli officials and media consistently implied they could be alive.

After the bodies were returned, Israel claimed a combination of forensics and Israeli “intelligence” had determined the children were “murdered” in captivity. Netanyahu claimed, without evidence, that their captors had “strangled the tender children with their own hands.” No public evidence has been produced to support this allegation.

Scahill also noted that Israel weaponized the fact that there was a mix-up during the transfer of the body of Shiri Bibas, which was fixed within 48 hours. As Scahill wrote:

Then, compounding an already intense situation, it emerged after forensic examination that the casket purportedly housing the body of Shiri Bibas did not actually contain her remains. Netanyahu accuses Hamas of an evil and cynical act of psychological terror and implies the group had deliberately given Israel the body of a “Gazan woman.” Hamas responded by saying it would investigate and soon announced that the return of the wrong body was a mistake due to the fact that Shiri Bibas’s remains had been kept with those of Palestinians killed in the same strike. Within 48 hours, her remains were located and handed over to the Red Cross.

A Propaganda Campaign

Israel is intentionally trying to sabotage the ceasefire agreement any way they can in order to give the false impression that Hamas is not willing to negotiate and therefore give them justification to restart the genocide in Gaza.

The propaganda around the Bibas family, from making unsubstantiated claims against the family’s wishes to covering up their own possible role in the family death is just a small part of this larger strategy.

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