From: The Guardian February 21, 2025
Middle East crisis: Israel claims Hamas killed Bibas children with their ‘bare hands’

Statement from IDF spokesman contradicts Hamas claim the family was killed in an airstrike

Israelis and Palestinians are bracing for another tense exchange of hostages, prisoners and detainees on Saturday after uproar in Israel over allegations that two child hostages were “brutally murdered” by Hamas, and the group’s failure to deliver the body of their mother, instead returning the corpse of an unidentified woman.

The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement on Friday afternoon that autopsy results and military intelligence concluded that members of Hamas, when they were seized in October 2023 “used their bare hands” to kill:
1. Ariel Bibas 4 years
2. and his 10-month-old brother, Kfir

“Their father, [the recently released hostage] Yarden Bibas, looked me in the eyes and asked that the whole world know and be shocked by the way they murdered his children,” the military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said, in a video address.

In Israel and around the world, the fate of the Bibas family has come to embody the trauma of the Hamas attack that ignited the war in Gaza.

Hamas said early in the conflict that the boys and their mother, Shiri 32 were killed in an Israeli bombing in November 2023
There was no immediate comment from the militant group on the IDF’s allegation.