‘This terrifying video is still all we have. We pray Shiri and her beautiful boys are still alive’

Of all the unspeakably brutal moments of Saturday 7 October, the appalling scene of terrified Israeli mother Shiri Bibas clutching her two young sons to her chest while being kidnapped by Hamas is among those perhaps most etched into the minds of the world.

Shiri, her husband Yarden, their two beautiful red-headed young boys, four-year-old Ariel and nine-month old Kfir, and Shiri’s parents, Yossi and Margit Silberman, were all taken from Kibbutz Nir-Oz.

On Monday evening Shiri’s cousin, Yifat Zailer, 37, spoke to Jewish News from her home in Tel Aviv about what the family is going through.

“I still can’t believe it,” she says. “It’s surreal. Every night, I read our last note to them.”

At 6.30am on that Shabbat morning, Yifat heard the red alert for rockets in her in Tel Aviv home. She grabbed her children and went to their safe room.

“I have a minute and a half to get to the shelter. Shiri and her family have 10 seconds because they are so close to the border. The first thing I did was to send Shiri a message.”

Some 400 men, women and children lived at Kibbutz Nir-Oz. Only 160 survived.

“The others are either dead or kidnapped, Yifat says. “I haven’t heard anything since Saturday. We only know, through the army, that they are there. In Gaza.’

Yifat reads out the messages she sent to her cousin. “Close the doors, hope you are OK. You can come to Tel Aviv and have a sleepover.”

Shiri responded with a heart emoji.

At around 10am, Yifat messaged again.

There were no further replies.

Dana, Shiri’s sister, lives on another kibbutz.

“Dana called me,” says Yifat. “We’d already been hearing some things on the news.

Dana said something had happened to Shiri but couldn’t tell me. She was in the safe room. I could hear she was terrified. She said, ‘Please find my parents’. I called everyone I know, people in the army, trying to find out where my uncle and aunt were.”

While she did this, Yifat was sent a picture by a friend. It was the image we have since all seen and been shocked by. Shiri, holding her two babies, looking terrified.

They’d been kidnapped into Gaza.

“This was my worst nightmare,” says Yifat. “There is a full video. You can see her very clearly. The kids are super quiet. They’re not even crying. We didn’t know whether her husband was killed or not. All we knew was that we had a video of her alive. It’s all we have. We hope she is still alive.”

Later on that morning, around 11am, “we knew that horrible things had happened. We didn’t know the magnitude but when the army entered the kibbutz, I managed to get in touch with a friend who told me they are missing.  They weren’t dead because their bodies weren’t discovered.”

Yifat reveals it took almost three days to confirm that Shiri and her children were not among the dead, because there were so many bodies to identify. Some were so badly burnt they are still not officially identified.

Then it was confirmed. They were in Gaza.

Yifat pauses.

“I can’t cry any more,” she says. “I have spoken about it so many times. On Monday we received the image of Yarden. He’d been recognised by a journalist who saw him on a motorcycle, crying, with a head injury. He’s surrounded by terrorists and being driven into Gaza. There’s blood on his face and hands. Since then, this is the only proof of life that we have and no new information.”

“We don’t know where they are,” continues Yifat. “We don’t know how they are being treated. Whether they are separated. My aunt has Parkinson’s and it’s now almost a week without her meds and I can’t even imagine the pain. I don’t know if the baby was fed. He needs formula. I can’t stop thinking about them. All day, all night, I sleep maybe two hours a night. I speak to everyone who wants to hear the story. We spoke to the embassies because my uncle is Argentinian and my aunt is from Peru. Hamas won’t let the Red Cross into Gaza. There’s a lot of stories.”

She’s compiled a video of her family to support global efforts to raise awareness of their kidnapping and expedite their release.

The impending ground invasion by the IDF scares her.

‘I’m scared they’ll be hurt,” she says. “They are people who were living their lives, sleeping in their bed on a Saturday morning. On the holy day of Shabbat. They were caught by surprise. No one was there for eight hours. It took the army a long time to get there but we will ask the questions after. They were left alone and the most horrible nightmare happened.

“The most horrendous thing is that they took the videos and uploaded them onto social media. Raping a young girl and uploading it. Burning a baby and uploading it. Killing innocent people. Kidnapping innocent people. Raping people in front of their children isn’t helping Palestine.

“Today it is us. Tomorrow can be anywhere else in the world. For years we have said Israel has the right to defend itself and now you know from what. And my family is paying the worst price. And I want them back. And we need the support of the world to put pressure on the Arab leaders of the world to finish this in the bet way possible so no one gets hurt on either side.

“The narrative has to change. I see what’s going on in London. They see the pictures of the (beheaded) babies. These can’t be justified as actions to free Palestine. This is Hamas.”