TEL AVIV — On lampposts, in shop windows and on smartphone screens across Israel, the posters show a smiling, red-headed baby boy clutching a pink elephant.
And now the country is bracing to learn Kfir Bibas’ fate.
The youngest hostage still in captivity in Gaza, Kfir was just shy of 9 months old when he was kidnapped during the Hamas-led terrorist attack Oct.7, 2023. On Saturday, he turned 2, 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 the 33 hostages expected to be freed during the first phase of the ceasefire deal, according to the Israeli government. But it is unclear if the toddler is still alive.
“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 thing,”
Clutching her two sons, as fighters bark orders, Shiri Bibas looked terrified in a video taken near their home in kibbutz Nir Oz in southern Israel on the day of the Hamas attacks.
Footage of the trio being herded by gunmen through Gaza’s southern city 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 one-week ceasefire in November 2023, the Bibas family never emerged from Gaza.
On one of the final days of the brief pause 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, Israel’s military said the claim could not be confirmed, but in February 2024 it acknowledged its fears for the family.
“Based on the information available to us, we are very concerned and worried about the condition and well-being of Shiri and the children,” Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israel Defense Forces' chief spokesperson, told a news conference.
Now, the Bibas family is daring to believe that more than a year of agonizing uncertainty may soon be coming to an end one way or another. “We know will bring us some kind of certainty, but we are very scared as well,” Ofri Bibas-Levy said of the ceasefire deal. “It could be a good certainty or a bad one.”
The 38-year-old occupational therapist said she was still holding out hope that Shiri Bibas and her two sons might be alive, “but we know the condition the hostages are being kept in.”
“So for a toddler and a baby, it’s difficult even if they survived the attack that Hamas said they were killed in,” she added. “We’re very worried, very, very worried.”
Kfir’s father, Yarden Bibas, was kidnapped separately from his wife and children and held in a different part of Gaza, according to hostages who were with him in captivity and since freed.
Nili Margalit, a neighbor in Nir Oz, said she last saw Yarden Bibas on Nov. 30, 2023, just before she was released in 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 horrible sentence to Yarden, then he is the one that has to look him in the eyes and tell him.”
Hamas did inform Yarden Bibas and the next day released a video of the distraught father. Ofri Bibas-Levy said: “I thought: I’m losing Yarden now because I couldn’t think that he could bear and survive this thing they told him.”
Yarden Bibas is also slated for release in the first phase of the ceasefire deal, which came into effect Sunday after almost 15 months of Israel's military campaign in the Gaza Strip. Health officials in the Palestinian enclave says more than 47,000 people have been killed since the start of the war, which began after Hamas launched multipronged attacks on Israel, killing 1,200 and taking around 250 people hostage, according to official tallies.
Bibas-Levy said she thinks constantly of her younger brother, “every second of every day; I don’t know if he’s dead or alive, if he ate today, if he showered, if somebody’s torturing him, if he’s sick, if he’s well. I don’t know anything.”
She was speaking at the edge of the so-called Hostage Square, the plaza in central Tel Aviv where families of those held in Hamas captivity have rallied for 15 months demanding their release.
Many in the crowd alongside her were carrying stuffed animals in honor of Kfir’s second birthday, an echo of the pink elephant he is holding in his hostage poster.
The family had searched the wreckage of Nir Oz many times in the hope of finding Kfir’s elephant but without success. And then, just days before the most recent ceasefire was signed, it turned up in the corner of a nursery.
“It was really very emotional,” Bibas-Levy said. “And hopefully a good sign, maybe.”
