The Murders of Ariel and Kfir Bibas: Were You Paying Attention?

In an official statement on February 21, 2025, IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said, “Ariel and Kfir Bibas were murdered in cold blood by terrorists. The terrorists did not shoot the two young boys — they killed them with their bare hands. Afterward, they committed horrific acts to cover up these atrocities.”

If you were shocked by this brutality against Jewish children, then I am sorry to say that you have just not been paying attention.

You weren’t paying attention in 2011, when Hakim Maazan Niad Awad and Amjad Mahmud Fauzi Awad peered through the window of the Fogel family home in Itamar, spotted four-year-old Elad and 11-year-old Yoav sleeping in their beds, and snuck in to murder them with knives. After that, they entered the parents’ bedroom, where they knifed and shot Ehud and Ruth Fogel to death. The terrorists then left the house. But when they heard the cries of a baby, they went back. Finding three-month-old Hadas in her crib, they again took out their knives and stabbed the baby to death. She was nearly beheaded.

The Fogel Family

Two other Fogel children survived the attack. When Amjad was captured, he told his Israeli interrogators that he would have killed them too. He just didn’t know they were there.

And you weren’t paying attention in 2001, either, when a sniper zeroed in on little Shalhevet Pas as she sat in her stroller. The terrorist pulled the trigger and a bullet to the head killed the 10-month-old baby.

And you surely weren’t paying attention in 2004, when terrorists opened fire on the Hatuel family car. When it stopped moving, the Gazans came up to the vehicle and shot Tali Hatuel, eight months pregnant, and her four daughters at close range. They were close enough to see the terrified and confused faces of Hila, 11, Hadar, 9, Roni, 7, and Meirav, aged two and still strapped in her car seat, before murdering them.

Shalhevet Pas and her parents

I know you were not paying attention in 2002, when a suicide bomber walked over to a group of women and children outside a Bar Mitzvah celebration in Jerusalem and detonated his explosives. Among the eleven people killed were sisters Shiraz (7) and Liran (3) Nehmad, Shaul Nehmad (15), Avraham Eliahu Nehmad (7), Lidor (12) and his sister Oriah (18 months) Ilan, and Ya’akov Avraham Eliyahu (7 months).

Were you even aware of the murder of Hallel-Yaffa Ariel, age 13, in 2016? The terrorist broke into her house, found her asleep in bed, and stabbed her to death. (The mother of the terrorist praised her son’s actions on camera and expressed hope that others would follow in his path.)

Those are just a few of the attacks since the year 2000 by Arabs from the Palestinian Authority that are most clearly directed at Jewish children.

Yet, even if you were somehow blissfully ignorant of all that, then you must have been paying attention on October 7, 2023. On that day alone:

• Mila Cohen, 10 months old, was murdered by Gazans in her home in Kibbutz Be’eri. She was shot while in the arms of her mother, Sandra.
• Twins Arbel and Shachar Siman Tov, age 5, were murdered by Gazans in their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz, alongside their brother Omer, 2. Their entire family was murdered that day.
• Eitan Kapshetar, 5 years old, and his sister Aline, 8, were murdered in their family car in Sderot. Their entire family was also wiped out that day.
• Noya Dan, 12 years old, was murdered by Gazans in Kibbutz Nir Oz. Noya was an autistic child and very close with her grandmother, who was also murdered alongside her that day.
• Twins Yanai and Liel Hetzroni, aged 12, were murdered by Gazans in their home in Kibbutz Be’eri.

And that is just some of the younger children murdered by the Gazan terrorists and their helpers that dark day. There are unfortunately many more.

As long ago as 1982, the Israeli representative to the United Nations sent a letter to the organization’s secretary-general in which he wrote, among other things:

“On 11 March 1982, at 1130 hours (local time), a time bomb exploded outside a crowded nursery school in the Jesse Cohen neighborhood in the city of Holon. The device contained nails which scattered as lethal projectiles in every direction.

“… It will be recalled that Israeli children, as well as Jewish children outside of Israel, have been one of the prime targets of the terrorist PLO over the years. Thus, for instance, on 7 April 1980, the PLO seized at Kibbutz Misgav Am two nursery buildings where infants and toddlers were asleep, together with some of their mothers.

“… Other PLO outrages against Israeli children include an attack on 28 November 1980 on a school bus full of children returning from a birthday party; the placing of two explosive devices in a children’s playground in Bat Yam on 15 January 1980; the murder of two little girls, aged four and three (and of their father) in Nahariyah on 22 April 1979; the murder of 21 schoolchildren in Ma’alot on 15 May 1974; the murder of 8 children, together with 10 adults, in Kiryat Shmonah on 11 April 1974; and the murder of 7 schoolchildren and 2 teachers on 22 May 1970.

“… Thus, for instance, on 27 July 1980, the PLO attacked, in Antwerp, Belgium, a group of 40 Jewish schoolchildren on a Sunday outing, murdering one of them and injuring 17 children and adults.”

And so it goes – back to pre-state Israel, as well. During the 1929 series of massacres and attacks on Jews across Israel, British Police Superintendent Raymond Cafferata reported, “On hearing screams in a room, I went up a sort of tunnel passage and saw an Arab in the act of cutting off a child’s head with a sword. … Behind him was a Jewish woman smothered in blood with a man I recognized as a[n Arab] police constable named Issa Sheriff from Jaffa. He was standing over the woman with a dagger in his hand.”

Ariel and Kfir Bibas

So, if you were shocked by the degradation and brutality of the Gazans in the murders of little Ariel and Kfir, I beg of you – for the sake of our children’s children – start paying attention.

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