For 16 months, the smiling faces of Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, Ariel and Kfir, had been slowly receding into the background of Israeli life as their photographs — posted on walls and bus stops soon after the family’s abduction to Gaza in October 2023 — began to fade, tear and peel.
On Friday, the Bibas’s lives and disturbing deaths were swept back to the forefront of Israel’s collective consciousness in such a startling and unsettling way that it set off fresh alarm about the fate of the fragile cease-fire in Gaza.
Early on Friday morning, the Israeli military announced that the body of Ms. Bibas — nominally returned, along with those of her sons, by Hamas to Israel on Thursday — appeared to be that of someone else. And an autopsy of the two boys, aged 4 and 8 months at the time of their abduction, revealed that they were killed by terrorists in Gaza, the military said.
Hamas, which had previously said they were killed in an Israeli missile strike, said in a statement that it was investigating the claims and suggested that Ms. Bibas’s body might have been mistakenly confused for that of a dead Palestinian in the chaotic aftermath of an Israeli attack. Neither side’s account could be independently verified.
The news set off a paroxysm of fury and agony in Israel rarely seen since the tumultuous days that followed Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, when up to 1,200 people were killed and 251 were abducted, including Ms. Bibas and her sons, on the deadliest day in Israeli history.
Responding to the military’s announcement, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel returned to the language of vengeance that defined his speeches in the aftermath of that attack.
“May God avenge their blood,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a recorded speech to the nation on Friday morning. “And we will also have our vengeance.”
The seething tenor of Mr. Netanyahu’s response was maintained across much of the Israeli political spectrum. Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister, said in a broadcast interview that the Bibas’s treatment showed how “the majority of Gazans want to murder all of the Israelis.” (Polling last fall suggested that less than 40 percent of Gazan Palestinians supported the Oct. 7 attack, down from more than 70 percent early last year.)
For some Israelis, the horror underlined the need to restart the war to defeat Hamas once and for all. The current truce is set to elapse in early March unless Hamas and Israel can agree to an extension. “The only solution is the destruction of Hamas, and this must not be postponed,” said Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister, in a post on social media.
But others called for calm, arguing that the fate of the Bibas family exemplified why the truce needed to be extended to bring home roughly 70 hostages still held, both dead and alive, in Gaza.
The village leadership at Nir Oz, the Bibas’s hometown, released a statement on Friday that called on Israel to “stick to our values and to the Bibas family’s clear demands at this moment: release, not revenge. The state must bring Shiri back by all means, in a way that does not jeopardize the continuation of the deal and the immediate release of all the hostages.”
Isaac Herzog, Israel’s mainly ceremonial president, also called on the government to “remember our highest duty — to do everything in our power to bring every one of our kidnapped sisters and brothers home. All of them. Until the very last.”
Six living Israeli hostages are set to be released on Saturday, and analysts said it was unlikely that Israel would do anything to jeopardize their freedom. Hamas announced their names on Friday morning, projecting a sense of business as usual. The six included two Israeli citizens — Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed — who were captured by Hamas years before the attack in 2023 after they entered Gaza of their own accord.
The long-term future of the truce seemed less clear. Arab leaders were set to meet in Saudi Arabia on Friday to try to thrash out a proposal for Gaza’s postwar reconstruction that would allow for the peaceful transfer of power from Hamas to an alternative Palestinian administration.
But in Israel, analysts speculated that the government would rather expel Hamas by force.
“If it were up to Netanyahu and his far-right partners, then next week — upon the completion of the first phase of the deal, with the return of four more bodies of fallen hostages — the path would be paved for the resumption of the war in Gaza,” wrote Amos Harel, a commentator on military affairs for Haaretz, a left-leaning newspaper. “This time, they promise, without restraints.”
Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting from Tel Aviv, and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad from Haifa, Israel.
