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 Bibases’ 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 long-term fate of the fragile cease-fire in Gaza. The truce looked set to continue through the weekend, as both sides prepared for another exchange of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners on Saturday, but the turmoil over the Bibas family heightened doubts about an extension.
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 terrorists killed them in Gaza “with their bare hands,” the military said.
A senior Hamas official, Mousa Abu Marzouq, said in a phone interview that the family was killed in an Israeli airstrike in November 2023, dismissing the accusation that a small militant group that held the hostages, the Mujahideen Brigades, had murdered them. But Mr. Abu Marzouq acknowledged that Ms. Bibas’s body may have been kept in Gaza by mistake, saying that Hamas members were now searching for her remains in a place where the family had been buried alongside Palestinians.
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 the Hamas-led attack 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.
For Palestinians, the devastation wrought by Israel’s military response to the Oct. 7 raids — a reaction that, among other consequences, razed Palestinian burial grounds and killed thousands of children including some younger than Kfir Bibas — has long overshadowed Hamas’s terrorist attacks at the start of the war.
But Israelis remain deeply traumatized by the October assault, and the return of the Bibas boys, coupled with the uncertainty about their mother’s whereabouts and the disrespectful way that Hamas paraded their coffins on Thursday, revived the torment.
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 the Oct. 7 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 Bibases’ 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.)
This combination of vulnerability and vengeance was compounded by the overnight news that, according to the Israeli security services, terrorists had detonated bombs on several buses across central Israel. The vehicles were empty at the time. Commentators said that the attacks were possibly a response to ongoing Israeli military operations in the occupied West Bank, which have displaced tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homes.
For some Israelis, the fate of the Bibas family 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 Bibases’ 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.”
For now, the truce seems likely to last at least another few days. 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 the two entered Gaza of their own accord. Israel said that it had received a list of hostages set for release and had informed their families but did not immediately confirm that they were the same six named by Hamas.
The long-term future of the truce seemed even less clear. According to terms agreed in January, the sides were supposed to begin negotiations for the deal’s extension nearly three weeks ago, but have not yet done so.
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 there would rather expel Hamas by force.
“If it’s up to Netanyahu and his far-right coalition associates, then next week — following the ending of the hostage deal’s first stage with the return of four more bodies of hostages — the road for renewing the war in Gaza will be set,” wrote Amos Harel, a commentator on military affairs for Haaretz, a left-leaning newspaper. “This time, they promise, without restraints.”
Reporting was contributed by Adam Rasgon in Jerusalem, Johnatan Reiss in Tel Aviv, and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad in Haifa, Israel.