Bibas family threatens to sue Israeli govt as official propaganda on hostage killings unravels

By WYATT REED AND MAX BLUMENTHAL – The Grey Zone

The Bibas family demands the Israeli government cease exploiting the deaths of their family members for propaganda purposes as layers of evidence support claims an Israeli airstrike killed them.

The relatives of an Israeli family killed while in Hamas captivity in Gaza have demanded the government stop making statements attributing blame for the killings of their loved ones, threatening to “take all legal measures at their disposal” if the Netanyahu administration refuses to comply. The request came three days after a declaration by Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari that Palestinian “terrorists” had “deliberately” killed two young members of the Bibas family “with their bare hands.”

Lawyers representing surviving members of the Bibas family have accused government ministries of seeking to exploit their plight for propaganda purposes, complaining “the family continues to receive, surprisingly, repeated inquiries from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the National Information System… with the aim of satisfying the public’s voyeuristic instinct.”

“Although it is surprising that it is necessary to request and emphasize this,” the lawyers continued, “we ask once again and in every language of request that all parties” be instructed “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.”

Read the Bibas family’s letter to Netanyahu and other officials here.

The Bibas family has become a symbol of the plight of Israelis taken captive on October 7, but the truth behind their experience remains obscured by official spin. All four family members were taken captive on Oct. 7, but the father was separated in the chaos.

While he survived his time in Hamas and was later released to Israel, his wife, Shiri, and two young sons, Kfir and Ariel, were killed while in the custody of the Mujahedin Brigades, a smaller, lesser known faction. According to a Mujahedin Brigades commander, “When [Shiri Bibas] was captured [on October 7], we sent her children with her out of compassion for them. The Israeli occupation killed her along with her children after bombing them along with their captors.”

The commander also declared that Shiri Bibas had served as a soldier in the Israeli army’s Unit 8200 intelligence division, which spies on and seeks to compromise Gaza residents, and later served in the army’s Gaza Division.

Though Hamas announced that Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas had been killed in an Israeli airstrike in November 2023, Israeli authorities were reluctant to openly acknowledge their fate. During an exchange of captives the following month, Hamas offered to hand over the remains of the dead family members. On December 3, Yarden Bibas delivered a video messaging from captivity stating that his wife and children had been killed in an Israeli airstrike – like dozens of other Israeli hostages – and pleaded with his government to negotiate for their freedom so he could give them a proper burial. But Israel rejected the appeals, and resumed its decimation of the Gaza Strip.

The return of their Bibas family members’ bodies this February 18, and the outrage stoked by the Israeli government in calculated fashion, now threatens to derail the tenuous ceasefire with Hamas.

Since his release on Feb. 2, Yarden Bibas has neglected to confirm the stunning comments he made while in captivity. However, the open letter his family delivered to top Israeli officials conveyed strident disapproval of the government’s narrative, and contradicts a statement by Hagari, the IDF spokesman, who claimed, “‘Yarden [Bibas] looked me in the eyes and asked that all the world know and be horrified by the manner in which they murdered his children.”

Funerals for the deceased Bibas family members are scheduled to take place on Feb. 26. The family has reportedly banned Israeli government officials from attending the ceremony. A day before the funeral, the sister of Yarden Bibas, Ofri, published a Facebook post telling Israeli Prime Minister to “shut up,” and accused him of “abuse for its own sake of a family that has gone through 16 months of hell.”

Meanwhile, as a new independent analysis supports claims that Israel killed the Bibas family members in an airstrike, Tel Aviv has deployed one of its most notorious spin doctors to keep the blame focused on Hamas.

The propaganda doctor is in

An official investigation into the exact cause of death has yet to be completed. Nevertheless, on Feb. 22, the head of Israel’s official forensic institute, Dr. Chen Kugel, published a video insisting that members of the Bibas family were not killed by Israeli bombing.

In the Bibas family’s letter, their lawyers explicitly accuse Kugel of attempting “to violate medical confidentiality” by repeatedly divulging details of their loved ones’ deaths without the family’s permission, referencing “confidential and sensitive information” which they noted “only the family has the right to decide how and whether it will be used.”

It wouldn’t be Dr. Kugel’s first time twisting reality to reinforce official Israeli government propaganda. Less than a month after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, Kugel was already hard at work laundering the myth of beheaded babies which Israel used to manufacture consent for its genocidal rampage, with a writer for The Economist noting that “Dr. Chen Kugel… told me he had seen the burnt, headless bodies of babies.”

This turned out to be a gargantuan lie, as only one baby was killed on October 7: 11 month old Mila Cohen, who was accidentally shot through the door of a kibbutz safe room.

In 2016, Kugel 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, stating at the trial that “there is no explanation for the direction of the shooting.”

The soldier later acknowledged “accidentally” firing a live round after he said he failed to ensure that his gun was loaded with blanks and failed to load a rubber bullet into a separate adapter. An article published in the New York Times at the time noted that “according to court documents, [the accused] expressed regret for aiming and firing at the young man.”

Prior to that, Kugel served as a key witness on the defense team of the Israeli sniper who killed the British human rights activist Tom Hurndall with a bullet to his brain. The soldier wound up being convicted in an Israeli court, where he received a slap on the wrist despite Kugel’s best efforts to bend the truth.

 

While insisting that Israel was not responsible for the death of the Bibas boys, Kugel confirmed that Israel had received the body of their mother, Shiri Bibas, after remains initially returned by Hamas turned out to belong to a different woman.

Hamas subsequently acknowledged the “the possibility of an error or mix-up of bodies,” attributing the confusion to the difficulty of retrieving corpses and body parts under the rubble caused by indiscriminate Israeli bombing.

But even after Israel received Shiri Bibas, the country’s notoriously fanatical Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, condemned the mix-up as a “serious violation of the agreement,” while Netanayahu pledged to “ensure that Hamas pays the full price for this cruel and evil violation of the agreement.” Two days later, citing what it called “Hamas’s repeated violations” of the deal, Israel unilaterally declared an end to the ceasefire, refusing to honor its commitment to give back over 600 Palestinians who’ve been detained without charge.

Today, the ceasefire hangs by a thread.

Israeli analyst finds Israel killed Bibas family members

Mainstream outlets from USA Today to the BBC have regurgitated the Israeli government’s claim that Hamas strangled the Bibas children with their bare hands, prompting centrist hereditary influencer Meghan McCain to call to “blast the people who killed this baby [Kfir Bibas] to hell.”

However, an analysis by Adar Weinreb, an independent Israeli researcher and former IDF soldier, demonstrates that an Israeli airstrike was the most likely cause of death for Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas.

“While Israel claims the Bibas family was ‘brutally murdered by terrorists,’ a closer look at the available evidence suggests otherwise,” Weinreb wrote. “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.”

Furthermore, “the available evidence does not support the claim that young children were systematically targeted” by Hamas,” Weinreb explained, noting that on Oct. 7, children under 13 “were killed at a rate approximately seven times lower than their share of the population,” and that children under 5, like the Bibas children, “were killed at a rate of approximately 11 times lower than their share of the population.”

 

Yet in the months after October 7, Israel targeted virtually anything that moved inside Gaza, including Israeli hostages. Weinreb pointed specifically to Noa Marciano, a 19-year-old corporal in the Israeli army who was “almost certainly killed by an Israeli airstrike” after being taken captive on October 7. In the aftermath of Marciano’s killing, Israeli military spokesman Hagari claimed the pathology report showed that “Noa was injured by the strike, but not in a life-threatening manner,” claiming “according to intelligence information, Noa was taken inside the walls of Shifa Hospital, where she was murdered by a Hamas terrorist.”

As Weinreb notes, “This narrative makes absolutely no sense. Why would her captors take her to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries only for a doctor to kill her? The far more plausible scenario is that Noa was injured in the airstrike, taken to the hospital, and died from her injuries.”

After all, Weinreb wrote, “among the 80+ released hostages, the single most consistent testimony is their constant fear of being killed by Israeli airstrikes.” This included Noa Argamani, a young Israeli woman who revealed after being rescued from the Gaza Strip in a blood-soaked raid by Israeli soldiers that she “was in a building that was bombed by the Air Force.”

 

“They are carrying out a Hannibal procedure on us”

On Feb. 25, Argamani testified before the United Nations about the harrowing moment when fellow captive Yossi Sharabi was killed in an Israeli airstrike, and she nearly suffered the same fate: “I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. I thought it was going to be the last second of my life. I screamed so loud so someone would hear me, and I heard Yossi screaming too. But after a few seconds, I stopped hearing from Yossi.”

During a meeting with Netanyahu’s cabinet, one former hostage reportedly declared: “The reality is that I was in a hideout that was bombed, and we became wounded refugees. This doesn’t even include the helicopter that fired at us on our way to Gaza. You claim there is intelligence, but the reality is that we were being bombed.”

Around 800 Israeli civilians are estimated to have died during the Oct. 7 attack, but it’s still unclear exactly how many were killed by Palestinian militants – and how many were killed by the Israeli military. A month after the war began, an Israeli helicopter pilot confirmed the military deployed a “mass Hannibal” against its own people that day. Under Israel’s Hannibal Directive, soldiers are authorized to open fire on both Israeli civilians and troops who are being taken captive to prevent them from being used as bargaining chips.

After being extracted to Gaza, at least three Israelis who managed to escape their Hamas captors were killed by Israeli forces who subsequently testified that they mistook them for Palestinians. Those soldiers even hunted down one of the escaped hostages on foot, executing him at point blank range.

In January of 2024, the mother of an Israeli soldier slain while being held in Gaza, Ron Sherman, revealed that he’d been killed by his own forces when the Israeli army gassed the Gaza tunnel he was in – a death which she said was “like Auschwitz.”

Noam Dann, the niece of captive Ofer Calderon, publicly complained, “They are carrying out a Hannibal procedure on us. My cabinet, my prime minister, my defense minister, are carrying out operations on my family, on citizens who were kidnapped from their homes – a Hannibal procedure.”

Many released captives have described being more frightened of Israeli bombing than of their Hamas captors. That fear was perhaps best summarized by Menir Oz, a released Israeli who told the country’s cabinet that when “we were sitting in the tunnels, we were terribly afraid that not Hamas but Israel would kill us, and then they would say – Hamas killed you.”

Though it might seem outlandish that the Netanyahu regime would deliberately bomb sites being used to hold Israeli hostages, according to Israeli sociologist Yigal Levy, “the government’s decision to attack Gaza despite the presence of hostages in the bombed sites can be considered an extension of the ‘Hannibal’ directive.”