Hamas and Israel wanted to exchange more hostages for prisoners: live updates

Israeli’s still anxious waiting for his wife, Shiri, and their two children, Ariel, now 5, and KFIR, who was 9 months old at the time of his conquest – the youngest hostage in Gaza. Last week Daniel Hagari, an Israeli military spokesperson, seemed to scrape the audience for the chance that they would not come alive, proverb The army was “seriously worried” for the mother and children.

Hamas claimed last year that Mrs Bibas and her children were killed by an Israeli air raid, but Israeli officials never confirmed that. Various hostages were killed in Gaza by Israeli troops, accidentally shot down or possibly as a result of Israeli air strikes. The army also said some Civil hostages may have been killed by Israeli troops when they were abducted on the day of the attack of 7 October.

The Bibas family has experienced ‘a twisted reality of hell’, said a family member, Yifat Zailer, in a interview Last year.

The family of Vier belonged to more than 180 inhabitants of Kibbutz NIR OZAn agricultural community in southern Israel, who were killed or abducted during the attack of 7 October. Since then, the family has become the faces of a national trauma that led to a fierce Israeli war in Gaza, aimed at exterminating Hamas, an attack killed more than 47,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza Health officials, who do not distinguish between fighters and citizens .

More than 1,750 people in Israel were killed in the war, according to the Israeli officials on the day of the attack of 7 October on the day of the attack of 7 October. The toll includes more than 890 members of the Israeli armed forces.

For more than a year of waiting, hostages and their supporters worn Orange balloons and worn orange shirts in honor of the missing children and their ginger -colored hair. They have held large events on the occasion of the first two birthdays of KFIR, which has never celebrated one of captivity.

All other children who were seized during the attack of 7 October were released in an earlier deal of the Stakten-Fires.

Israeli officials under pressure Hamas negotiators in recent days for more clarity about Mrs Bibas and her children, according to Israeli media. As a female citizen with children, they were expected to be released in the initial phase of the deal of the ceasefire, for soldiers or men, if they were still alive.

Mr. Bibas was abducted separately from his family.

In the early morning hours for his conquest, he texted his sister, ofri Bibas-levy, to tell her about incoming rocket fire, according to an interview she gave Can, The Israeli public broadcaster. He later texted her that militants had entered the camp. He had a gun, he told her, but the militants had automatic guns.

He then described scenes of collisions on the Kibbutz and his fear that his two young sons could not remain silent.

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

Video of the attack of 7 October on NIR OZ revealed images of militants that open the front door of the Bibas family.

Somewhere before her brother was caught, Mrs. Bibas-Lefy told, he texted her and their parents that he loved them. At 9:45 am he wrote: “They are inside.”

Mrs Bibas-Leve told you that the first she heard of her brother’s kidnapping of 7 October when she saw a video of militants who kidnapped him a few days later.

In November 2023, not long after Hamas said that Mrs Bibas and her children were killed by Israeli bombing, the group published a video of Mr. Bibas who was told that his wife and children were killed while he was crying.

Images of the Bibas family were shown during the crisis in the Israeli psyche. They were on the front page of one of the most popular newspapers in the country, Yedioth Ahronoth, under the head “A mother and two small souls, led in the darkness.”

And throughout the country, graffiti that the family displays appears on the street. Some show that Baby Kfir holds a pink elephant, as in the photo used for his hostage poster. Others show an imagined reunion of the Bibas family, who light a Hanukka -Menorah.

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

Johnatan Reiss And Matthew Mpoke Bigg contributed reporting.