Theatre of the Macabre: "Murdered in Cold Blood - The Tragic Fate of the Bibas Family”
A melodramatic masterpiece, starring Benjamin Netanyahu as a bereaved and grieving leader ably accompanied by the Hasbara Philharmonic Orchestra
When the story of the Bibas Family ‘broke’ a couple of weeks ago Israeli politicians and the whole Israeli population went completely insane and, on cue, across the Western political and media class teeth were gnashed, garments were rent and copious floods of crocodile tears were shed for the two Bibas children and their Mum Shiri.
The most bizarre thing about this is that everyone - both in Israel and in the West - already knew the Bibas family was dead. As Owen Jones points out in a recent Substack, Hamas announced back in November 2023 that they were killed by an Israeli airstrike and offered to return their bodies but Israel said no. It is now becoming abundantly clear why.
The whole grotesque spectacle started with Israel and its propagandists - AKA the Hasbara Philharmonic Orchestra1 - pretending that they didn’t know if the Bibas family were dead or alive when it had been widely reported that Shiri Bibas and her two children had been killed in an Israeli airstrike way back in November 2023, as already note above, and that Hamas had offered to return their bodies but Israel refused.
Despite this, however, the Hasbara Philharmonic struck up a soulful song of “hope” that the Bibas family, or at the least the two Bibas children, might be still alive. Here is a particularly egregious example from Eylon Levy - an Israeli hasbarist so hot for Israel he got fired, by Israel, for lying too enthusiastically - about Israel - to UK politician James Cameron back in the March of 2024.
The prelude to the Bibas family melodrama had already been played at the UN on January 9 last year by Israeli Ambassador Gilad Erdan who brought a birthday cake to the podium to mark the first birthday of Kfir Bibas. His show-stopping aria “Kfir, this birthday cake is for you. You are the reason Israel is fighting day and night” left not a dry eye in the house.
As reported by Middle East Eye on February 21, the Israeli military, via its spokesperson Daniel Hagari, finally acknowledged that they did, in fact, know the Bibas family were dead “no later than November 2023” but that, for some undisclosed reason, they couldn’t announce it to the public. Hagari then turned up the heat by accusing Hamas of killing them with their bare hands. He did not provide any further details or evidence.
To date, Israel has still failed to provide any evidence for this incendiary accusation - an accusation which, it should be noted, makes zero sense given that the Bibas family, like all the Israelis taken to Gaza on October 7, were taken as hostages and hostages are of a lot more use alive than they are dead. There is also the not insignificant fact that the Israeli government have proven themselves to be pathological liars throughout this genocide.
Furthermore, Israel has even, as Palestinian writer Mohammad Shehada points out here, been caught out telling exactly the same lie about another group of hostages:
In Dec 2023, Israel informed the families of Nik Beizer, Ron Sherman, & Elia Toledano that Hamas had murdered them in captivity.
Ron Sherman's mother kept digging into it, & discovered the IDF lied & killed her son & the 2 others by "asphyxiation" when they "gassed" the tunnel they were held in.
Last Sep, the IDF finally admitted they killed those 3 in an airstrike & had lied about it.
What tipped the mother off is that a CT scan found "no gunshot, stab wounds, shrapnel, fractures, external wounds & no signs of strangulation", so the IDF narrative that Hamas had killed them "with their bare hands" didn't fly.
But no concern about the pesky facts of the matter was going to stop the Hasbara Philharmonic - and First Violin Bari Weiss was on hand to play a particularly plangent melody - “My heart is shattered”.
Pretending to swallow this obvious lie Weiss, ever the drama queen, claimed to be so upset by the fate of the Bibas family that she informed her large Twitter / X following that this week, the week Israel ‘announced’ the Bibas deaths (remember, everyone, including Weiss, has known they’ve been dead since November 2023), had been ‘darker’ than any she can remember and that her “heart is shattered”.
Darker than the week of October 7 Bari? Really? Surely you haven’t forgotten October 7. The worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. That terrible day that has justified every Israeli war crime since then? The day Israel opened fire on its own citizens and probably killed as many, if not more, of them than Hamas? That day?
I am sorry if I seem callous but watching someone like Bari Weiss, a tireless Israeli hasbarist who bears direct responsibility for the death of Palestinian poet and academic Refaat Alareer2, pretending to cry over the Bibas family makes me sick to my stomach. This is not only because I know that Bari Weiss, who bayed ceaselessly for the continuation of the genocide for its entire 15 grisly months, doesn’t give two sh*ts about the Bibas family, but also because her crocodile tears are deliberately calculated to manufacture consent for the resumption of that genocide.
And of course it’s not just Bari Weiss who is “crying” - big Zionist accounts all over Twitter / X, and high-profile hasbarists all over the corporate media, have been pretending to care about a family who - I would absolutely guarantee - few of them have given a single thought to since their deaths were first announced in November 2023. Just like Bari Weiss, these hasbarists are shedding their tears purely to generate the requisite emotional temperature in the general population to allow Israel to break the ceasefire and resume its genocide. This linking of anger at Hamas’s brutality with the righteousness of the call to take out that anger against the entire population of Gaza is beautifully illustrated by the charming ‘Mish’, a prominent Zionist account, on Twitter / X, in her re-post of a post by ‘journalist’ Megyn Kelly.
A particularly grotesque aspect of the Bibas Family Saga - as told by Israel and its hasbarists - has been the relentless focus on the fact that the children were red haired and thus, incontrovertibly ‘white’. As Caitlin Johnstone notes in a recent post on Twitter / X -
this aggressive fetishisation of the Bibas kids’ red hair is deliberately shaped to inform a Western audience that these were white kids and not the dark children who’s deaths we’re supposed to ignore.
A short AI film, made by the Israeli Foreign Ministry specifically for Western consumption, drives the importance of that red hair home with punch-you-in-the-face level obnoxiousness.
The focus on the Bibas children’s red hair has also been highlighted - literally - by buildings all over the world being lit up in orange lights.
The crocodile tears and maudlin sentimentality of the hasbarists are particularly horrifying in light of the fact that they all know full well that Hamas wanted to release all of the civilian hostages - including the Bibas family - during the first weeks of the war but Netanyahu refused. I repeat - all of them, every last one of them, KNEW this - it was widely reported. In other words, the Bibas family would all still be alive and thriving back home together in Israel if Netanyahu had not been so very, very hot to murder every last Palestinian in Gaza ASAP.
Here is a recent statement from Taher Al-Nono, media advisor to the Head of the Political Bureau of Hamas, to Al-Jazeera reminding us all of this.
I would like to recount some facts, particularly regarding the early days when a group of civilians was taken hostage. We wanted to release the civilians immediately and without any conditions during the initial days of the war, and we clearly stated that we wanted a ceasefire so that we could deliver all the civilians.
At that time, all the civilian hostages were alive, but Netanyahu and his army rejected this offer. We continued discussing this matter until we reached the first truce in November 2023, at which point we offered to hand over the Bibas family, who had been killed shortly before. We wanted to deliver the mother and the bodies of the two sons as part of the deal, but the blame for the delay—and who now cries over this event—is on the occupation. It was the "israeli" army that bombed the residential area where this family lived. Tens of thousands of Palestinian children have been killed, and their remains have become intermingled.
The one bearing responsibility for these massacres is the one who committed them. The occupation destroyed all our hospital capacities; it even demolished the equipment used to lift rubble and recover bodies. This may in the future affect the possibility of a third phase of the agreement.
Finally, if you’re still having doubts about who is ultimately responsible for the fate of the Bibas family, have a listen to this recording of a meeting between Netanyahu and the families of the hostages - a meeting to which Netanyahu also invited a group of fanatical settlers and - as Dan Cohen notes - you’ll understand why the Bibas family came home in coffins.
Meanwhile, playing as the supporting feature to the Bibas Family Saga, was another piece of theatre focusing on the way Hamas returned the bodies of the Bibas family and Oder Lifshitz (“Grotesque Moment Calculated to Break a Nation’s Heart”) - where Netanyahu and various Israeli politicians and assorted hasbarists pretend to be ‘horrified’ at the disrespect shown by Hamas and the Palestinian population in general to the Israeli dead.
Never mind that the way in which the Israeli bodies were returned was orders of magnitude more respectful than the way in which Palestinian bodies have been returned by Israel, the Hasbara Philharmonic - playing in perfect harmony again - ranted and raved about the inhumanity, the barbarity, the cruelty of Hamas for their horrendous disrespect for the dead hostages. Here’s one particularly hysterical Zionist having a blue fit about Hamas because “they PARADED dead Jews in coffins”.
What would they have preferred? Would they be happier if Hamas had wrapped the bodies in blue plastic and tipped them out of a truck - with some of their organs missing?
Even President Trump grabbed a seat in the wind section - bloviating away about the “humiliating return of the bodies of Israeli hostages” in order to provide back-up to Netanyahu’s wish to break the ceasefire and return to murdering Palestinians. According to Trump his tender heart was so affected by the horrible sight of Hamas transferring the coffins over to the Red Cross - who then draped them respectfully in white cloth and loaded them into their vehicles - that suddenly wanted to “see Gaza destroyed” and and left with not “even one existing building”.
Trump is a truly loathsome man but at least he’s honest - unlike Joe Biden and Antony Blinken and the rest of the Democratic Administration who enthusiastically provided weapons and PR cover for Israel’s genocide for 15 months while telling us all they were working ‘round the clock for a ceasefire’.
Then, to really ram home the message that he simply wasn’t going to take any more of this Hamas barbarity Netanyahu postponed the handover of 600 Palestinian prisoners in protest against the Israeli prisoners being released in “humiliating ceremonies”.
As reported by AP -
The statement by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office came early Sunday as military vehicles that normally move in advance of the buses carrying prisoners left the open gates of Ofer prison, only to turn around and go back in.
The release of 620 Palestinian prisoners had been delayed for several hours and was meant to occur just after six Israeli hostages were released on Saturday. It was meant to be the largest one-day prisoner release in the Gaza ceasefire’s first phase.
One can only imagine the agony of the prisoners and their families when that news broke3.
As journalist Jonathan Cooke points out, many of these prisoners, including medical personnel
were seized off Gaza’s streets following the 7 October Hamas attack. They have been held without charge, tortured and subjected to barbaric conditions that Israeli human rights groups have compared to "hell".
But, of course, what the Israeli hostages have gone through in Hamas’ ‘humiliating ceremonies’ is so much worse than being imprisoned in one of Israel’s torture dungeons - as is so perfectly illustrated in the photograph below. That’s right, your eyes are not lying to you, the Israeli hostage is kissing the Hamas fighter on the forehead. He also kissed a second fighter on the forehead - just in case people thought the first kiss was an accident.
In reality, of course, the only ones ‘humiliated’ by these ceremonies were Netanyahu and his friends in the Hasbara Philharmonic who immediately ascended to Wagnerian heights of hysteria and hyperbole in their attempts to express their utter ‘horror’ at Hamas’ barbarity. Here’s ‘GAZAWOOD - the PALLYWOOD saga’ - a particularly vile Zionist account - trying to cope their way out of the sight of an Israeli kissing a Palestinian.
Apparently, according to ‘Gazawood’, this happy looking young man has had “every possible horror” inflicted upon him. I wonder if ‘Gazawood’ has seen any of the photos taken by the IDF of the horrors they inflict upon the people of Gaza?
And here’s the Atlantic - which at this point is essentially not a lot more than a propaganda magazine for Israel - weighing in with its thoughts about the matter.
Speaking of ‘performance art’ - Netanyahu, ever the tragedian, then added some even more lurid details to his version of the Bibas family tragedy . As reported by journalist Dan Cohen on Twitter / X:
Now he claims that Hamas first "slaughtered Shiri before her own children" and then "crushed their tiny skulls."
Israel rejected Hamas's claim that they were killed in an airstrike, said nothing for over a year, but now claims to know not only how they died, but the exact sequence in which they were supposedly murdered, and that their heads were crushed to make it appear that they had been killed in airstrikes as Hamas claimed.
It's obvious that Netanyahu is lying. If his implausible claims against the wishes of the family don't make it clear enough, the demonic look on his face certainly does.
Now, if you cast your minds back you will recall that this is exactly the same kind of propaganda we were subjected to in the weeks following October 7. Remember all the beheaded babies? The babies burned in ovens? The babies hung on clotheslines? Remember Hamas tying children together and burning them alive? Even President Biden repeated the beheaded babies lie - having seen those poor unfortunate babies “with his own eyes” apparently - until he was forced to retract the story by White House staff.
And who could forget the horrific tale - recounted by no less of a personage than Secretary of State Antony Blinken at an emergency hearing asking Congress where he was asking for more money for Israel - of the family tortured and then murdered by Hamas as they sat around their breakfast table at a kibbutz?
the father had his eye gouged out in front of his kids, the mother’s breasts cut off, the girl’s foot amputated, the boy’s fingers cut off before they were executed and then their executioners sat down and had a meal. That’s what this society is dealing with.
As journalist Max Blumenthal notes on Twitter / X this story had absolutely no basis in fact. As reported by October 7 Fact Check, the story was found to have originated with Yossi Landau, one of the first responders who also wrongly claimed to have seen beheaded babies and a pregnant woman with her stomach slit open.
Respected Western media outlets like the BBC, CNN, and the Guardian then regurgitated these horrific stories for Western populations and when they were all, in fairly quick order, debunked not one of those outlets withdrew them. The atrocity propaganda peddled by these shameless excuses for journalists is still up on the websites of these outlets. You can still find them - completely intact. No retractions. No apologies.
And, speaking of babies, the grand total of one baby was killed on October 7 - 11 month old Mila Cohen, who was accidentally shot through the door of a kibbutz safe room - but Israel, never one to let truth get in the way of a good yarn, nevertheless carried on cynically portraying Hamas to be baby killing monsters. They did this because they know that talking incessantly of babies being killed would so horrify ordinary people it would make it orders of magnitude easier for them to turn a blind eye to the horrors Israel it had planned for Gaza.
A particularly gruesome example of what can happen if you are too successful in whipping ordinary people into a frenzy over all the babies so barbarically murdered on October 7 was the case of the Chicago man, Joseph Czuba, who killed 6-year-old Palestinian-American Wadea Al-Fayoume, as reported here by Omar Sulieman for RNS not long after it happened.
On Saturday (Oct. 14, 2023), authorities say Joseph Czuba stormed into the child’s home with rage in his eyes and an intention to shed as much Palestinian blood as possible. According to prosecutors, he first choked Hanaan Shahin, Wadea’s mother; when she was able to escape briefly, Czuba took a 12-inch military-grade knife and proceeded toward Wadea.
Wadea ran up to the familiar man to give him a hug — prior to last week, the man had behaved kindly. Instead, with no mercy, the man stabbed Wadea 26 times, shouting, “You Muslims must die!” Wadea died shortly afterward. The man turned to the child’s mother and stabbed her 12 times, but she somehow survived and is in critical condition.
This man told Wadea, presumably while he was stabbing him 26 times “that he deserved this because Palestinians killed babies on October 7”.
As civil liberties attorney Jenin Younes points out in a post on Twitter / X
Czuba is responsible for his actions, but the Israeli government’s lies and propaganda contributed to the hateful psychosis that enveloped Czuba so many others, and ultimately to Wadee’s [sic] tragic death. This genocidal mania has gripped the same people, who are calling for the blood of more Palestinian children today.
And then, of course, Israel itself - using the cover granted by its October 7 baby-killing propaganda - then went on to kill thousands upon thousands of Palestinian babies. Israel has beheaded babies with its bombs and turned their tiny bodies into dust, it has burned babies to death, it has shot babies and toddlers in the head, it has left babies to die alone, cold, hungry and frightened in abandoned hospitals.
Sadly, however, the softness most people feel towards babies has not been activated with respect to Palestinian babies, despite the horror of their deaths, because Western media very rarely reports those deaths in such a way as to humanise the gut-wrenching tragedy of them. Instead they are reported to Westerners simply as numbers - no names, no hair colour, no details about their family or the way they used to coo sweetly when their Mama came into the room. Nothing.
Eventually, however, the weight of evidence against the baby-killing stories had piled up to the point where it was no longer feasible to continue with them, and it was then that the ‘mass rape’ story was seeded in late 2023. This story was then spread far and wide via the now notorious New York Times article ‘Screams Without Words’. I’ve discussed this at length in other posts here and here.
The entire ‘mass rape’ hoax was also quickly exposed but when this lurid piece of hasbara first broke it was recited as gospel by Israeli politicians and officials and their Western counterparts and faithfully disseminated to millions by our supinely obedient media. To question Israel’s story was to expose yourself as, at the very best, a terrorist sympathiser, at worst some sort of monstrous sadist who was not only an apologist for rape and a disbeliever of Israeli women, but also, almost certainly, a Holocaust denier.
Now, with Netanyahu desperately searching for a pretext to break the ceasefire and resume his assault on Gaza and the events of October 7 “ever more distant in the rear view mirror and Israeli crimes all too visible”, as journalist Jonathan Cooke put it in a recent post here on Substack, “Israeli leaders have been desperately trying to shift attention to a fresh narrative battleground”.
As Caitlin Johnstone and Sana Saeed point out on Twitter / X, perfectly on cue with the need to generate enough outrage to resume killing Palestinians, the Hasbara Philharmonic has struck up an hysterical accompaniment to Netanyahu’s latest tear-jerker - “Murdered in Cold Blood - The Tragic Fate of the Bibas Family”
The story of the Bibas family - and in particular the two red-haired Bibas children - as told by Israel is perfectly calibrated to catapult Israelis and, perhaps even more importantly, Westerners right back into post-October 7 levels of apoplectic horror at the ‘barbarity’ of not just Hamas but the entire Palestinian population and, even more importantly, to reignite their sympathy for the poor, persecuted Israelis.
As Caitlin Johnstone notes in a recent post here on Substack:
They do this because sympathy is a fundamental primer for narrative control. If you sympathize with someone, you are much more likely believe the things they say and trust their narratives about what’s going on. If you lack sympathy for someone, then anything they say is going to be viewed with much more skepticism.
Johnstone goes on to point out that
A good manipulator understands this, so they do everything they can to make sure everyone is sympathetic toward them and unsympathetic toward anyone whose interests conflict with theirs. That’s why we’re still talking about October 7 even after 16 months of genocidal atrocities and ethnic cleansing plans. Israel and its apologists throughout western governments and media have been working diligently to draw sympathy toward Israel for those killed and abducted on October 7, and to stomp out all sympathy for the orders of magnitude more Palestinians who’ve been killed and abducted by Israel. This has allowed narratives which serve the interests of Israel to dominate the mainstream western consensus on this issue, thereby bringing in concrete material benefits like weapons, bulldozers, the weakening of Israel’s enemies, and the eventual replacement of Palestinians with Israeli Jews on what used to be Palestinian territory.
Hence all the crocodile tears, all the “shattered” and “broken” hearts, all the talk of ‘humiliation’ and Hamas barbarity and the constant reference to the Bibas children and, in particular, to baby Kfir. All of this is cynically calibrated to elicit sympathy from ordinary Westerners which, unfortunately, it is a ridiculously easy job because most Westerners are primed to immediately feel sympathy for Israel and Israelis by 76 years of Israeli hasbara.
Israelis are ‘just like us’, Israel is the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ with the ‘most moral army in the world’ whereas Palestinians are frightening dark-skinned, wild-eyed ‘terrorists’ who ‘hate Jews’ and who ‘teach their children to hate’. And running even deeper than that Westerners are marinated, from a young age, in anti-Arab, anti-Black, anti-anybody-who-isn’t-a-white-Westerner, West-is-best propaganda via our schools, our universities, our museums, our art galleries, our newspapers, our TVs, our movies, our literature and even our comic books.
And because Westerners have been marinated in anti-Arab racism and pro-Israel propaganda since birth, not only is it easy to whip them into a froth of outrage about the the deaths of Israeli children but it is also more or less guaranteed that most of them would not, even one moment, stop and wonder why they aren't similarly outraged by the death of thousands of Palestinian children - as Katie Halper points out in this post on Twitter / X.
It’s these ordinary people - people who see themselves as ‘good’, as possessed of a decent moral compass, that the hasbarists are aiming to keep on side with this sort of propaganda. When such people are told by the spokesman for the IDF that Hamas beat the Bibas babies to death - babies!!! - with their bare hands their first instinct, naturally enough, is to believe him. Most of them wouldn’t even imagine that a spokesman for the Israeli army would be lying. Then, once the information has been accepted as true, the normal human reaction to such news kicks in - the sympathy for the victims - the poor innocent Bibas family, the poor little babies and, by extension, the poor, eternally victimised Israelis and also the the righteous anger against the perpetrators - those deranged terrorists and those evil Palestinians who voted for Hamas and celebrated October 7.
Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Been Against This, in a thought-provoking interview with Chris Hedges - see video below - succinctly summed up the immense propaganda power of demonising your enemy - which is what Israel’s relentless campaign of atrocity propaganda against Hamas since October 7 has been aimed at. El Akkad noted that such demonising tactics are
the fastest way to avoid dealing with something that would otherwise make very privileged people very uncomfortable. It shuts down any ability to give any situation any context.
Al Akkad went on to note that
if there is no context then whatever happens like on October 7th becomes not only incomprehensible but the people who carry out something like that after 16 years of being locked in a concentration camp - they become incomprehensible.
It is this, ultimately, that Israel aims to achieve not just with Hamas but with the entire Palestinian population - to rob their actions of any context and to render them incomprehensible. Beyond the pale. Indeed, this is what Israel has been doing with Palestinian resistance - and the Palestinian people - for over 76 years. And Western corporate media - who make up an indispensable section of the Hasbara Philharmonic - have dutifully played and replayed the Israeli narrative to Western audiences - for 76 years.
And by so doing, particularly over the last 16 months, the Western media has made itself directly complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people - as Francesca Albanese, in her characteristically direct fashion, pointed out recently:
This is not just a genocide that has been overlooked. This is a genocide that has been justified and enabled by the media.
We need to stop allowing Israel and its Western enablers to write the script for what happened on October 7. We need to stop allowing Israel and its Western enablers to tell the story of what is happening in Gaza and in the West Bank. We need to stop listening to the manipulative melodies of Hasbara Philharmonic and start listening to - and raising up - the voices of the Palestinian people and the voices of those - like Francesca Albanese - who work tirelessly to support them.
Here are some Palestinian voices and pro-Palestinian perspectives here on Substack for you to follow. Please share any I haven’t mentioned here in the comments so I can follow them too.
Abubaker hasn’t started writing here yet but you can follow him on Twitter / X here and he also writes regularly for the Electronic Intifada.
This moniker for Israel’s hasbarists and their useful idiots in the West was coined by Mouin Rabbani, a well-known Dutch-Palestinian Middle East analyst, in a post on Twitter / X recently.
As Yoav Litvin pointed out in an article in The New Arab last year, “when Israel disseminated atrocity propaganda about a baby being ‘baked in an oven’ on October 7, Bari Weiss accepted it as fact, trolling Palestinians who challenged it, including the late poet Refaat Alareer. Alareer held Weiss responsible for the massive online harassment he faced and warned of its potentially deadly consequences. Tragically, Alareer was later targeted and killed by Israeli forces in a precision attack”.
The 600 Palestinian hostages have, thankfully, since been released.
Thanks, Karyn. Another clinical dissection of the dissembling that every modern person is constantly subject to. Some kind of intellectual self-defence training is needed. I just can’t understand why the dictum ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’ isn’t the operational guide for our supposed ‘independent media’.
And the lies they just keep coming! Excellent post, Karyn......