The story of Kfir Bibas ought to chill the blood of anyone with a shred of moral decency. A 10-month-old infant, torn from the sanctuary of his home on 7 October 2023, alongside his mother, Shiri, and elder brother, Ariel, and made a hostage by Hamas. It is not merely a tragedy but a testament to the depths of depravity that humanity is capable of reaching.
Kfir, a child far too young to comprehend the world into which he was born, now stands as a grotesque emblem of innocence defiled by malevolence. To consider the cold and calculated decision to abduct him is to confront the terrifying reality of terror as strategy. This was no collateral damage; this was an act of deliberate barbarism, designed to instil fear, to shock the conscience, and to weaponise vulnerability.
We live in an age awash with images of conflict, where the horrors of war often blur into a seamless cycle of tragedy on our screens. Yet the face of Kfir Bibas, a baby whose greatest worry should have been teething, cuts through this numbness. His image demands that we ask ourselves: how have we allowed such unmitigated savagery to take root and, worse, to be rationalised?
Let there be no equivocation about Hamas. They are not freedom fighters, nor are they misunderstood revolutionaries. They are the adherents of an ideology that glorifies death, that seeks out the defenceless as targets, and that cloaks its grotesque deeds in the language of liberation. Nor should we shy away from condemning the international complacency that enables such acts. Every morally ambiguous statement that invokes “both sides,” every mealy-mouthed appeal to “understanding root causes,” serves only to excuse those who kidnap infants and brutalise families.
The plight of the Bibas family is not an isolated act of cruelty; it is emblematic of a much larger failure. Kfir’s story forces us to confront the fact that the victims of terror are not mere statistics to be tallied in bureaucratic reports or academic studies. They are real people, each life extinguished or scarred by ideologies that revel in violence and oppression.
And what of the so-called civilised world? The governments and institutions that condemn with one hand while placating with the other? Their unwillingness to take a clear and decisive stance against such evils, their hesitancy to name them for what they are, renders them culpable—not in the commission of these acts but in their perpetuation through inaction.
Kfir Bibas’s name may never appear in history books. He will not be remembered as a leader, a writer, or a thinker. But his story—and his hauntingly innocent face—should serve as a moral reckoning. It forces us to ask whether we still have the courage to defend the values we profess to hold dear. If we cannot rise to meet this challenge, if we cannot confront and defeat such evil, then what hope remains—not just for Kfir but for any child, anywhere?
