WATCH: In Kfir Bibas’ Eyes

This week, beneath a gray sky heavy with grief, Shiri, Kfir, and Ariel Bibas were laid to rest in Tsoher Regional Cemetery near their shattered home in Kibbutz Nir Oz. A mother and her two innocent children—snatched from their lives by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and brutally murdered in captivity for no reason beyond their Jewish identity—finally returned to Israeli soil. Their story, a piercing wound in the nation’s heart, is now the soul of a new advocacy video, crafted with cutting-edge technology to retrace their abduction and the horrors they endured through the eyes of Kfir Bibas, a redheaded infant just nine months old when he was torn from his crib.

The video begins where Kfir’s nightmare did: dawn on October 7, 2023. As Simchat Torah celebrations loomed, Hamas militants breached the Gaza border, descending on Nir Oz with a ferocity that would claim a quarter of its residents. Amid the chaos, Shiri Bibas, 32, huddled in their safe room with Kfir, a chubby baby with a shock of orange hair, and Ariel, his spirited four-year-old brother obsessed with Batman. Yarden Bibas, 34, their father, stepped out to confront the attackers, a desperate bid to protect his family. It failed. Video footage captured that morning—raw, indelible—shows Shiri clutching her boys, her face a mask of terror as gunmen barked orders, dragging them into Gaza. Yarden, bloodied from a head wound, was taken separately on a motorbike, his fate diverging from theirs.

Kfir, the youngest hostage of the war, became an emblem of innocence defiled. At nine months, he couldn’t crawl far or speak his first words, yet he was thrust into a labyrinth of tunnels and cages. Shiri and her sons were handed to the Mujahideen Brigades, a Hamas-allied faction, and held in Khan Younis. The advocacy video animates this descent—dark, suffocating spaces where Shiri’s pleas in Hebrew, “Stop, stop,” echo unanswered, a mother’s instinct clashing with unrelenting cruelty. For 16 months, Israel clung to hope, marking Kfir’s first birthday in January 2024 with orange balloons—the color of his hair—and his second in 2025 with muted prayers, as no proof of life emerged.

Hamas claimed in November 2023 that an Israeli airstrike killed Shiri, Kfir, and Ariel, a narrative they pushed without evidence. Israel treated it as propaganda, though fears deepened. Yarden, released on February 1, 2025, after 484 days of torment, emerged gaunt and clinging to faint optimism. “My light is still there,” he said of his family, unaware their lives had ended over a year earlier. The video captures his anguish—taunted by captors with lies about their deaths, forced to film propaganda, beaten and starved—mirroring the psychological war waged against all hostages.

The truth arrived in coffins on February 20, 2025, during the ceasefire’s first phase. Hamas handed over four bodies, staging a cynical ceremony in Gaza that the U.N. branded “inhumane.” Forensic tests confirmed Ariel and Kfir’s remains, killed “with bare hands” in November 2023, per IDF findings shared with global partners but unverified publicly. Shiri’s body wasn’t among them—Hamas sent a Gazan woman’s remains instead, sparking outrage and a demand for her return. On February 21, after Israel’s outcry, Shiri’s true remains were delivered, her murder affirmed by forensic chief Dr. Chen Kugel, who found no bombing injuries, contradicting Hamas’s tale.

The video, a joint effort by the Israeli Congress and High-Tech Headquarters, produced by Screen Post Productions, doesn’t flinch from this brutality. Through Kfir’s imagined gaze, it recreates the abduction’s chaos, the captivity’s despair, and the murders’ cold execution—a nine-month-old and his brother, symbols of a war’s toll, extinguished by hands that knew no mercy. It ends with their funeral on February 26, 2025, a closed ceremony where Argentina, their dual homeland, mourned for two days. Yarden, now a widower and childless, stood with family, their journey closed but unhealed.

This is more than a memorial. It’s a clarion call to the world: Hamas is a terror machine, akin to ISIS, that steals babies from cribs and murders them for being Jews. The video, approved by the Bibas family, urges viewers not to close their eyes—#Don'tCloseYourEyes—to share it on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and beyond. Kfir’s brief life, snuffed out at 10 months, demands we bear witness, ensuring his red hair and innocent smile haunt the global conscience until justice prevails.