Latest news with #OdedLifshitz
NBC News
26-02-2025
- Politics
- NBC News
Bibas family laid to rest as thousands line the streets of Israel
The fate of the three hostages had become an emotional open sore for Israelis during the period between their kidnapping and the return of their bodies late last week and early this week. While Hamas said early in the war that the three had been killed, the Israeli government had been unable to confirm their deaths. The boys' remains were returned on Saturday, following a ceremony which saw Hamas militants parade their coffins on stage in scenes that have been widely condemned by human rights groups and the international community. The remains of Oded Lifshitz, 84, who was also abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz were also returned that day. His remains were laid to rest on Tuesday. Forensic examinations later showed that a casket bearing the image of Shiri did not contain her body, although Hamas returned her remains on Monday. Her husband and the children's father, Yarden, 35, was also abducted on Oct. 7 2023 and returned alive on Feb. 1, apparently unaware that his family had died. As black vans carried the Bibas' caskets and their living relatives through the central city of Rishon LeZion, huge crowds of Israelis stood on side streets and main roads and wept. Many held blue-and-white Israeli flags punctuated by the orange balloons and clothing that mourners and activists have adopted in honor of the Bibas boys' striking red hair. One image showed Shiri's sister, Dana Silberman-Sitton, reaching out from one of the black vans to hold the hand of a well-wisher in another vehicle. Smaller groups of mourners did the same on the rural highways that the procession used to reach the Tsoher cemetery in the south of the country, where they were laid to rest. While the family requested only those invited attend the funeral, they asked that it be screened in Tel Aviv's "Hostage Square," given the level of heartache the family's fate has generated across the country.
Associated Press
25-02-2025
- Associated Press
Funeral procession held for Israeli hostage Oded Lifshitz after the return of his body from Gaza
Video A funeral procession for one of the oldest Israeli hostages taken captive by Hamas was held in southern Israel on Tuesday. The body of Oded Lifshitz, 84, was returned to Israel earlier this month under the ongoing Gaza ceasefire deal. (AP video shot by Ami Ben Tov)
Arab News
25-02-2025
- Politics
- Arab News
‘Dad, you're home': Israeli hostage who died in Gaza laid to rest
NIR 'OZ, Israel: Hundreds of people gathered on Tuesday at a small cemetery in a southern Israeli community to bid a final farewell to Oded Lifshitz, a kibbutz founder who died in captivity in Gaza. Palestinian militant group Hamas returned Lifshitz's body to Israel last week, part of an ongoing truce deal that has halted the Gaza war — triggered by Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack in which the veteran journalist was abducted from his home. 'Dad, now you're home,' said his son Arnon Lifshitz at the cemetery in Nir Oz. Among the attendees at the funeral were lawmakers, activists, European diplomats and Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who asked for 'forgiveness that the State of Israel did not protect you, your family and your kibbutz.' 'In the face of such inhuman cruelty, you were left to stand alone,' said the president. Lifshitz, then aged 83, was taken hostage from his home on the kibbutz during Hamas's 2023 attack. His wife, Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, was also seized but released by Hamas after 18 days. Israeli officials said Oded Lifshitz was murdered by his captors from militant group Islamic Jihad, which has fought alongside Hamas in Gaza. In addition to Lifshitz, the bodies of three other Nir Oz residents taken hostage and killed in captivity — Shiri Bibas and her two young sons — were returned last week. The three members of the Bibas family will be buried on Wednesday. At Lifshitz's funeral, Hen Avigdori, whose wife and daughter were taken hostage from a neighboring kibbutz and released in the war's first truce in November 2023, said that 'it should have ended differently, he should be here with us.' To Avigdori, seeing the row of graves 'of people who were murdered here on October 7, and those who are waiting for their loved ones to be returned, is a difficult feeling.' 'This kibbutz has become a symbol of the neglect.' Lifshitz had a long career with the now defunct, left-leaning newspaper Al Hamishmar, and was a long-time defender of Palestinian rights. In 1972, he defended Bedouins who were expelled from the Sinai Peninsula by occupying Israeli authorities. A decade later, during the Lebanese civil war and Israel's invasion of Lebanon, he was one of the first journalists to report on the Sabra and Shatila massacres in which Israeli-backed Christian militias killed between 800 and 2,000 Palestinians in Beirut refugee camps. More recently, Lifshitz, an Arabic speaker, had been actively involved for years with Road to Recovery, an organization which helps Palestinians receive medical treatment in Israel. Shlomo Margalit, also one of the founders of Nir Oz and a friend of Lifshitz, said that 'Oded was a man of peace.' 'All his life, he worked for the well-being of our neighbors.' Yocheved Lifshitz said that in their 67 years together, she and Oded 'fought... for social justice and peace.' 'Unfortunately, we received a terrible blow from those we had helped on the other side.' Hamas and its militant allies took 251 people hostage during their October 2023 attack. Of those, 62 are still being held hostages in Gaza, including 35 the Israeli military says are dead. Bibas and her two sons, Kfir and Ariel, had become symbols of the ordeal suffered by the Israeli hostages. Ariel was aged four at the time of the attack, while Kfir was the youngest hostage, just nine months old. At the cemetery, one of Lifshitz's grandsons Dekel Lifshitz told AFP that the cactus garden his late grandfather had cultivated on the kibbutz was a sign of his 'determination.' 'It takes years to succeed in growing a garden like this, and it reminds me that he was always active.'
Yahoo
25-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Hamas's Theater of the Macabre
At first, Thursday's festivities in Gaza seemed like just another sordid spectacle in a 16-month exhibition of debasement. In front of a raucous crowd, Hamas gunmen displayed coffins containing the remains of four Israelis: an octagenarian peace activist named Oded Lifshitz, child hostages Ariel and Kfir Bibas—ages 4 years and nine months, respectively, when kidnapped—and their mother, Shiri. A label affixed to the latter's coffin declared that she had been 'arrested' on October 7, presumably for the crime of existing while Jewish. All four corpses were handed over to the Red Cross for transfer to Israel as part of the ongoing cease-fire deal. Then Israeli coroners concluded that the two children had been murdered by their captors and that the woman's body wasn't their mother's after all. A moment of particularly acute horror briefly broke through the headlines that have been dominated by President Donald Trump's turn on Ukraine. 'I condemn the parading of bodies and displaying of the coffins of the deceased Israeli hostages by Hamas on Thursday,' declared United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, an otherwise relentless critic of Israel. 'Any handover of the remains of the deceased must comply with the prohibition of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.' [Read: What Hamas wants] The truth is, body switching might be new to this conflict, but macabre theatrics are not. Since the day Hamas invaded southern Israel and used GoPro cameras and phones to document its massacres—including uploading the execution of a grandmother to her Facebook page—the group has been staging a show for the world to see. Dressing its sadism in the flimsy disguise of Palestinian nationalism—a ruse that has seemingly fooled more Western college students than residents of Gaza—Hamas has attempted to win a perverse propaganda war even as it has lost the actual war in lopsided fashion, to the horrific devastation of Gaza's civilian population. Some of these efforts are only now coming to light. In January, the 20-year-old soldier Daniella Gilboa was released from captivity in one of the first exchanges under the current cease-fire deal. She revealed that she had been forced by her Hamas jailers to stage her own demise. 'Today we are filming you dead,' one reportedly told her, compelling her to pose in powder and debris as though she'd been killed in an Israeli air strike. Hamas subsequently released a blurry image that it claimed was of a female hostage blown up by Israel. The woman had Gilboa's tattoo. Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another terror group that joined Hamas in its October 7 assault, similarly falsely claimed that the 76-year-old hostage Hanna Katzir had died, only to release her in a November 2023 exchange. The Bibas debacle had no such bittersweet ending. On Friday, Hamas quietly handed over another body that was identified as actually belonging to Shiri Bibas, claiming it was just a 'mix-up.' This may well be true: Shiri and her children were taken captive on October 7 by the Mujahideen Brigades, a small armed group that presumably retained custody of their bodies. When the trio turned up dead, Hamas might have had little notion of exactly what happened to them. Of course, this did not stop the group from claiming, without evidence, that Israel had killed the three hostages in an air strike, as though this would somehow make the people responsible for the deaths of the snatched children someone other than the child-snatchers. As it turned out, Hamas didn't even have the right bodies, let alone any insight into their manner of death, and was seemingly piling deception upon its depravity. With the establishment of an unstable cease-fire last month, the Hamas show has taken to broadcasting scenes of public humiliation of Israeli hostages to the world via Al Jazeera and social media. Eli Sharabi, 52, was compelled to speak at his release about how he looked forward to reuniting with his wife and daughters—his captors knew, but didn't tell him, that they had been murdered on October 7. Sharabi was released alongside two other hostages in emaciated condition, flanked by obviously well-fed Hamas gunmen. Yarden Bibas, husband of Shiri and father of the slain boys, was forced to wave limply to an assembled crowd at his February 1 release, even as Hamas kept the fate and bodies of his family from him. And on Saturday, just two days after the bizarre Bibas body swap, 22-year-old Omer Shem Tov was instructed by a masked cameraman to kiss his captors onstage, resulting in a viral social-media clip. Getty distributed a photo from this stunt that multiple media outlets republished without caveat or disclosure. Finally, Hamas brought two unreleased hostages to Saturday's ceremony, made them watch as their countrymen were freed, and then released a propaganda clip of them begging for their own lives. [Graeme Wood: A record of pure, predatory sadism] But perhaps most chilling was the release of a hostage Hamas chose not to humiliate. For nearly 10 years, the group has imprisoned Hisham al-Sayed, a mentally ill Muslim Bedouin Israeli civilian who wandered into Gaza. As part of Saturday's exchange, the terrorist group quietly released him without fanfare to the Red Cross, transferring the 37-year-old back to Israel sans ceremony or jeering crowds. It quickly became clear why. After reuniting with his son, al-Sayed's father, Sha'aban, gave a devastating account to the press about his condition. 'He is broken,' the elder al-Sayed said. 'He says a lot of incomprehensible things. He speaks in a whisper, maybe out of fear. I believe he is in a state of mental torture.' Hamas officials had previously told Al Jazeera that the group had handed over al-Sayed without the usual hoopla out of respect for the Arabs of Israel. 'Hamas are liars,' retorted the father. 'They didn't want people to see what state he was in, and that's why there was no ceremony. If they had any respect for people, they would have released him a long time ago.' Hamas's hostage propaganda is blunt and transparently self-serving. And like all theatrical performances, it requires a certain suspension of disbelief. Unlike most, however, it also requires a suspension of belief in humanity. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
25-02-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
Hamas's Theater of the Macabre
At first, Thursday's festivities in Gaza seemed like just another sordid spectacle in a 16-month exhibition of debasement. In front of a raucous crowd, Hamas gunmen displayed coffins containing the remains of four Israelis: an octagenarian peace activist named Oded Lifshitz, child hostages Ariel and Kfir Bibas—ages 4 years and nine months, respectively, when kidnapped—and their mother, Shiri. A label affixed to the latter's coffin declared that she had been 'arrested' on October 7, presumably for the crime of existing while Jewish. All four corpses were handed over to the Red Cross for transfer to Israel as part of the ongoing cease-fire deal. Then Israeli coroners concluded that the two children had been murdered by their captors and that the woman's body wasn't their mother's after all. A moment of particularly acute horror briefly broke through the headlines that have been dominated by President Donald Trump's turn on Ukraine. 'I condemn the parading of bodies and displaying of the coffins of the deceased Israeli hostages by Hamas on Thursday,' declared United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, an otherwise relentless critic of Israel. 'Any handover of the remains of the deceased must comply with the prohibition of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.' The truth is, body switching might be new to this conflict, but macabre theatrics are not. Since the day Hamas invaded southern Israel and used GoPro cameras and phones to document its massacres—including uploading the execution of a grandmother to her Facebook page—the group has been staging a show for the world to see. Dressing its sadism in the flimsy disguise of Palestinian nationalism—a ruse that has seemingly fooled more Western college students than residents of Gaza —Hamas has attempted to win a perverse propaganda war even as it has lost the actual war in lopsided fashion, to the horrific devastation of Gaza's civilian population. Some of these efforts are only now coming to light. In January, the 20-year-old soldier Daniella Gilboa was released from captivity in one of the first exchanges under the current cease-fire deal. She revealed that she had been forced by her Hamas jailers to stage her own demise. 'Today we are filming you dead,' one reportedly told her, compelling her to pose in powder and debris as though she'd been killed in an Israeli air strike. Hamas subsequently released a blurry image that it claimed was of a female hostage blown up by Israel. The woman had Gilboa's tattoo. Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another terror group that joined Hamas in its October 7 assault, similarly falsely claimed that the 76-year-old hostage Hanna Katzir had died, only to release her in a November 2023 exchange. The Bibas debacle had no such bittersweet ending. On Friday, Hamas quietly handed over another body that was identified as actually belonging to Shiri Bibas, claiming it was just a ' mix-up.' This may well be true: Shiri and her children were taken captive on October 7 by the Mujahideen Brigades, a small armed group that presumably retained custody of their bodies. When the trio turned up dead, Hamas might have had little notion of exactly what happened to them. Of course, this did not stop the group from claiming, without evidence, that Israel had killed the three hostages in an air strike, as though this would somehow make the people responsible for the deaths of the snatched children someone other than the child-snatchers. As it turned out, Hamas didn't even have the right bodies, let alone any insight into their manner of death, and was seemingly piling deception upon its depravity. With the establishment of an unstable cease-fire last month, the Hamas show has taken to broadcasting scenes of public humiliation of Israeli hostages to the world via Al Jazeera and social media. Eli Sharabi, 52, was compelled to speak at his release about how he looked forward to reuniting with his wife and daughters—his captors knew, but didn't tell him, that they had been murdered on October 7. Sharabi was released alongside two other hostages in emaciated condition, flanked by obviously well-fed Hamas gunmen. Yarden Bibas, husband of Shiri and father of the slain boys, was forced to wave limply to an assembled crowd at his February 1 release, even as Hamas kept the fate and bodies of his family from him. And on Saturday, just two days after the bizarre Bibas body swap, 22-year-old Omer Shem Tov was instructed by a masked cameraman to kiss his captors onstage, resulting in a viral social-media clip. Getty distributed a photo from this stunt that multiple media outlets republished without caveat or disclosure. Finally, Hamas brought two unreleased hostages to Saturday's ceremony, made them watch as their countrymen were freed, and then released a propaganda clip of them begging for their own lives. Graeme Wood: A record of pure, predatory sadism But perhaps most chilling was the release of a hostage Hamas chose not to humiliate. For nearly 10 years, the group has imprisoned Hisham al-Sayed, a mentally ill Muslim Bedouin Israeli civilian who wandered into Gaza. As part of Saturday's exchange, the terrorist group quietly released him without fanfare to the Red Cross, transferring the 37-year-old back to Israel sans ceremony or jeering crowds. It quickly became clear why. After reuniting with his son, al-Sayed's father, Sha'aban, gave a devastating account to the press about his condition. 'He is broken,' the elder al-Sayed said. 'He says a lot of incomprehensible things. He speaks in a whisper, maybe out of fear. I believe he is in a state of mental torture.' Hamas officials had previously told Al Jazeera that the group had handed over al-Sayed without the usual hoopla out of respect for the Arabs of Israel. 'Hamas are liars,' retorted the father. 'They didn't want people to see what state he was in, and that's why there was no ceremony. If they had any respect for people, they would have released him a long time ago.' Hamas's hostage propaganda is blunt and transparently self-serving. And like all theatrical performances, it requires a certain suspension of disbelief. Unlike most, however, it also requires a suspension of belief in humanity.
