(Nir ‘Oz) Kfir Bibas, with his fluff of red hair and his pink elephant comforter, was less than nine months old on October 7 when commandos from the Islamist movement Hamas kidnapped him from Nir Oz, a kibbutz in the south of Israel, close to the Gaza Strip.
It is in this agricultural village that the youngest of the approximately 250 hostages taken by force by Hamas should have celebrated his first birthday on Thursday.
The Islamist movement announced in November the deaths of the baby, his brother and his mother. Israeli authorities have not confirmed this. Their loved ones cling to the hope that they are alive and continue to struggle to demand their release.
On Thursday, they held a symbolic anniversary in Tel Aviv.
If Kfir and his family had been there, there would have been “music, laughter, family and friends, and not the noise of planes and gunfire,” said Yossi Schneider, a parent, during the a visit organized for the press by the Hostage Families Collective, “ Bring them home now » (“Bring Them Home Now”).
“It’s crazy to plan the birthday of someone who isn’t there, to put up all these balloons, to make cakes, and to do all these things you do for a birthday…”, says- he.
Deserted Kibbutz
In the background, in the deserted kibbutz with its cacti and frangipani trees, the song of parakeets mixes with explosions and bursts of machine guns.
The Gaza Strip is less than three kilometers away, and a plume of black smoke is emerging from the suburbs of Khan Younes, the epicenter of Israeli army operations for several weeks.
Nir Oz was the scene of one of the bloodiest attacks carried out on October 7 from the Gaza Strip by Hamas which resulted in the death of some 1,140 people on the Israeli side, mainly civilians, according to an AFP count. made from official Israeli figures.
In retaliation, Israel vowed to “annihilate” Hamas, and around 24,300 people, the vast majority of them women, children and adolescents, were killed in the Gaza Strip by its bombings and military operations, according to the ministry. of Hamas Health.
Of the approximately 400 residents of Nir Oz, a close-knit community, around a quarter were either killed or kidnapped after hours of shooting and violence.
Israeli authorities announced the death of eight kibbutz hostages, and 40 were released, most of them during a truce at the end of November, but the fate of around thirty remains uncertain.
Among them, Kfir Bibas, his four-year-old brother Ariel, and their parents Yarden and Shiri Bibas.
The images showing her face twisted in terror in front of her captors, hugging the two children, were one of the incarnations of the violence of the attacks which traumatize Israel.
The day before Kfir Bibas’ birthday, the collective “ Bring them home now » insisted on showing us her now deserted crèche which welcomed twelve babies before October 7.
“No one” to his aid
He shows his bed with its white sheet printed with blue balloons in a small building overlooked by an anti-missile concrete screed.
Here, a CD with “the prettiest little girl in kindergarten”, a famous lullaby in Israel. There, tables of meal times and naps that remain blank. The teacher had just put everything in order for the start of the school year after the Sukkot holidays which ended on the weekend of the 7th.
All the inhabitants of Nir Oz have been evacuated and no one knows if some will one day return to the kibbutz whose houses were burned.
Kfir Bibas’ family returned to the nursery several times, looking for the elephant comforter, which was nowhere to be found. “Since October 7, we have been looking for a cuddly toy like this,” says Mr. Schneider.
Ariel, Kfir’s brother, loves superheroes. He had asked the nursery to write under an image of Batman “I fly and I save people stuck in a crevasse”. “It’s like a prophecy,” he said.
“Now he is underground,” in Hamas’s sprawling network of tunnels in the Gaza Strip, “and no one is coming to his rescue.”
According to Israeli authorities, 132 hostages are still in Gaza. Among them, 27 died, according to an AFP count based on Israeli data.