They became a potent symbol of Israel’s hostage crisis after video from the Hamas-led 2023 attack showed Palestinian militants leading away a distraught mother clutching her two small red-haired sons. Another video showed the father of the same family being spirited away to Gaza on a motorcycle, his head bloodied.

On Friday, Hamas said the 35-year-old father, Yarden Bibas, will be one of three male hostages to be freed on Saturday.

Israelis are still anxiously awaiting word of his wife, Shiri, and their two children, Ariel, now 5, and Kfir, who was 9 months old at the time of his capture — the youngest hostage taken into Gaza. Last week, Daniel Hagari, an Israeli military spokesman, seemed to brace the public for the likelihood that they would not come out alive, saying the military was “gravely concerned” for the mother and children.

Hamas claimed last year that Ms. Bibas and her children had been killed by an Israeli airstrike, but Israeli officials have never confirmed that. Several hostages were killed in Gaza by Israeli forces, accidentally shot or possibly as a result of Israeli airstrikes. The military has also said some civilian hostages may have been killed by Israeli forces as they were being kidnapped on the day of the Oct. 7 attack.

The Bibas family has been through “a twisted reality from hell,” a relative, Yifat Zailer, said in an interview last year.

The family of four were among more than 180 residents of kibbutz Nir Oz, a farming community in southern Israel, who were killed or abducted in the Oct. 7 attack. Since then, the family became the faces of a national trauma that sparked a fierce Israeli war in Gaza aimed at eradicating Hamas, an onslaught that has killed more than 47,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials, who do not distinguish between combatants and civilians.

More than 1,750 people in Israel have been killed in the war, about 1,200 of them on the day of the Oct. 7 attack, according to Israeli officials. The toll includes more than 890 members of the Israeli military forces.

Throughout more than a year of waiting, hostage families and their supporters have carried orange balloons and worn orange shirts in honor of the missing children and their ginger-colored hair. They have held large events to mark the first two birthdays of Kfir, who has never celebrated one out of captivity.

All other children seized in the Oct. 7 attack were released in a previous cease-fire deal.

Israeli officials pressed Hamas negotiators in recent days for more clarity on Ms. Bibas and her children, according to Israeli media. As a female civilian with children, they were expected to be released in the initial stages of the cease-fire deal, before soldiers or men, if they were alive.

Mr. Bibas was abducted separately from his family.

In the early morning hours before his capture, he texted his sister, Ofri Bibas-Levy, to tell her about incoming rocket fire, according to an interview she gave to Kan, the Israeli public broadcaster. Later, he texted her that militants had entered the camp. He had a gun, he told her, but the militants had automatic rifles.

He then described scenes of clashes on the kibbutz and his fear that his two young sons would not be able to keep quiet.

“It feels like the end,” he wrote her at 9:10 in the morning.

Video from the Oct. 7 attack on Nir Oz revealed images of militants drilling open the Bibas family’s front door.

Sometime before her brother was captured, Ms. Bibas-Levy told Kan, he texted her and their parents that he loved them. At 9:45 in the morning, he wrote: “They’re in.”

Ms. Bibas-Levy told Kan that the first she learned of her brother’s Oct. 7 kidnapping when she saw a video of militants abducting him a few days later.

In November 2023, not long after Hamas said Ms. Bibas and her children were killed by Israeli bombing, the group released a video of Mr. Bibas being told his wife and children had been killed, as he broke down crying.

Images of the Bibas family have been seared into the Israeli psyche throughout the crisis. They were on the front page of one of the country’s most popular daily newspapers, Yedioth Ahronoth, under the headline “A Mother and Two Small Souls, Led Into the Darkness.”

And across the country, graffiti depicting the family has appeared on the streets. Some show baby Kfir holding a pink elephant, as in the photo used for his hostage poster. Others show an imagined reunion of the Bibas family, lighting a Hanukkah menorah.

“I know they became a symbol,” Ms. Bibas-Levy said in a tearful news conference last February. “But for us, it’s our family, and we want them back.”

Johnatan Reiss and Matthew Mpoke Bigg contributed reporting.



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