When innocence is murdered

Kfir and Ariel Bibas signify far more than the loss of two innocent lives. Since it was revealed that these young brothers from Israel’s Kibbutz Nir Oz were executed at the hands of terrorists who then mutilated their bodies in a fruitless attempt to conceal their crimes, one video has haunted me. It wasn’t that of the macabre ceremony orchestrated by Hamas terrorists, parading the coffins of these beautiful, fiery-haired boys against a backdrop of a bloody-fanged Bibi and upbeat music. Nor was it the video of Kfir and Ariel being dragged into Gaza by armed terrorists on October 7, 2023, while their terrified mother, Shiri, clung to them.

It was one I watched 24 hours before the dreadful news of their murders was confirmed, as the people of Israel waited in agony, clinging to the futile hope that Hamas’s announcement of their deaths was just another sick game.

It was filmed by the boys’ father Yarden. It documents the first time Ariel met his newborn brother Kfir. Ariel’s eyes widened in awe as he gazed at his sleeping sibling. “This is your little brother,” Shiri said in Hebrew, her immense joy palpable despite her face not being visible on camera. Ariel waddled closer, propped himself up on the couch where the tiny bundle of sweetness lay in his car seat, and gently patted Kfir with a tenderness that only a child could embody.

We were all that young and pure once; all of us—even the terrorists who murdered Kfir and Ariel.

None of us is born evil; nobody wakes up one day and decides to execute babies. The savagery that would lead someone to murder innocence is the direct result of that very same innocence being ruthlessly stolen from them.

The horrifying footage of terrorists parading four coffins on a stage before handing them to the Red Cross was accompanied by scenes of Gazans, including children, cheering on the murderers. The sick joy displayed by the onlookers at what they thought were four dead Jews (which turned out to be three, as Shiri Bibas’s body was not in that fourth coffin) was learned behavior.

Those calling for freedom for Palestinians on college campuses and elsewhere while finger-pointing at Israel are completely missing the point. Paraphrasing Gandhi, true freedom—and true imprisonment—starts and ends in the mind. The minds of the children in Gaza, however, are under lock and key, thanks to the systematic indoctrination they undergo.

From a younger age than that of Ariel, kids in Gaza are taught by Hamas—and their enablers at entities such as the UN Relief and Works Agency—that their lives are meaningless unless they take part in the violent eradication of Israelis and Jews from this earth. These lessons—incessantly broadcast on children’s TV programs, embedded in school curricula, and exhibited in street art—fundamentally alter the minds of their recipients. A quote often attributed to Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl states: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” In Gaza, the space between the stimulus of incitement and the response to it has been reduced to microscopic proportions.

When I think of baby Kfir, little Ariel, their late mother Shiri, and their bereaved father Yarden, my heart shatters twice; once for this precious family, and once more for the destruction of innocence in Gaza. That a pure and perfect newborn can become so tainted by hate that they grow up to be a killer is nothing less than an abhorrent crime against humanity. I cry unending tears for the Bibas family, and I pray that the space between stimulus and response that Frankl described—the freedom to choose another way—will one day expand enough for the children of Gaza to recognize it exists at all.