Jewish? Israeli? Palestinian? Hamas’ depravity extends to them all.
In a span of three days, Feb. 20-23, 2025, Hamas . . .
• Released four dead hostages, including Oded Lifschitz, an elderly peace activist who ferried unwell Gazan children to Israel for treatment; and Kfir, nine months, and Ariel Bibas, four. All three — murdered by Hamas terrorists in captivity.
• Staged a propaganda disgraceful ceremony in direct contravention of not only the Geneva Convention but of the ceasefire agreement that it signed — a “ceremony” of releasing dead bodies of children in coffins with broken keys.
• Released a body that Hamas said was Shiri Bibas, but was not, forcing a new and even deeper wave of grief.
• Released, finally, another body, necessitating a late night return, on Shabbat, to the staff of Israel’s National Forensic Laboratory, to determine whether this second body was that of Shiri Bibas.
• Reaccepted the body of the dead Palestinian woman whom Hamas also disgracefully abused by trying to pass her off Shiri Bibas; and did not even identify the dead Palestinian woman, whose own human dignity was violated in this “transfer,” without public apology or any show of remorse.
• Affirmed that it had lied about the Bibas family being killed in an Israeli airstrike, a propaganda piece that anti-Israel activists around the world over grabbed onto as evidence of Israeli wrongdoing, without stopping to ask why the Bibas family was in Gaza in the first place, and why Israel went to war in the first place.
• Instilled an even deeper apprehension in the families awaiting their own loved ones on Feb. 22, wondering what depraved “surprise” Hamas might have in store for them.
• Released six live hostages — two of whom suffer from mental illness, who had been kept hostage by Hamas for 10 years! (Who holds mentally ill people — individuals to a large degree helpless — for a decade? Imagine the father who for 10 years did not know where or how his son was? The father may never find out because the son returned to him on Feb. 22 after 3,595 days is catatonic.)
• Forced two Israeli hostages to watch as the six live hostages were released, a new nadir of sadistic psychological terror, and then shared the video on Telegram for the world to see —again, a direct contravention of the Geneva Convention and the ceasefire agreement it itself signed.
In a span of three days, Feb. 20-23, 2025, Hamas forced a simple moral choice on all of humanity, including Israel’s enemies:
Either you condemn hostage taking and cold blooded murder of children, or you don’t.
Either you align with the people who created this vile, inhumane, anti-Semitic, depraved and lie-filled “ceremony,” or you don’t. Either you are with the beautiful people —Shiri, Kfir, Ariel, Oded — or you aren’t. It’s really a binary. Everything else is details. Everything else can be negotiated.
Reminder: This war would end today — and could have ended any day since Oct. 8, 2023 — if Hamas would surrender and would return all of the hostages. It is Hamas who is responsible for the Oct. 7 massacre, the hostage taking and the death of its own citizens for whom — another reminder — Hamas built no shelters, only tunnel infrastructure for its terror operations. For Hamas, it is more important to keep Israelis alive as hostages than to protect its own people.
Indeed, the moral choice is stark.
© IJN 2025
