Israel seeks information on Bibas family after father’s release

Israel on Saturday demanded information from mediators who brokered the ceasefire in Gaza about the fate of three family members of freed hostage Yarden Bibas.

“Yarden has returned home. But his wife Shiri and his children Ariel and Kfir have not. We have been searching for them for a long time, tracking their traces and investigating their fate,” Gal Hirsch, Israel’s hostage coordinator, said in a statement.

“The Bibas family… has been living in constant fear for their lives for a long time… We continue to demand information about their condition from the mediators.”

In a statement through Israeli campaign group the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, the Bibas family said “a quarter of our heart has returned to us after 15 long months” following the 35-year-old’s release.

“But the home remains incomplete,” the family said, adding they would “continue with hope and the call for the return of Shiri, the children, and all the hostages”.

Like Bibas, his wife Shiri and their two boys were seized by militants on October 7, 2023, during Hamas’s attack on Israel and taken to Gaza.

Bibas’s sons — Kfir, the youngest hostage, whose second birthday fell in January, and his older brother Ariel, whose fifth birthday was in August — have become symbols of the hostages’ ordeal.

Hamas has previously declared that Shiri and the children were killed in an Israeli air strike in November 2023, but Israel has not confirmed their deaths.