The Israel Defense Forces said it had forensically identified the bodies of two Israeli hostage children returned by Hamas on Thursday – Kfir Bibas and his older brother, Ariel – but that the additional body they received is not that of their mother, Shiri Bibas.
“No match was found for any other hostage. This is an anonymous, unidentified body,” the IDF said in a statement on social media.
“This is a violation of utmost severity by the Hamas terrorist organization, which is obligated under the agreement to return four deceased hostages,” the IDF said. “We demand that Hamas return Shiri home along with all our hostages.”
The identification of deceased hostages was conducted by Israel’s National Institute of Forensic Medicine in collaboration with the Israel Police, the military said.
The IDF said that “professional officials, based on the intelligence available to us and forensic findings from the identification process, Ariel and Kfir Bibas were brutally murdered by terrorists in captivity in November 2023.”
Kfir was just 9 months old and Ariel was 4 years old when they were kidnapped along with their parents, as Hamas fighters tore through Israel’s border towns in the Oct. 7 attack that killed 1,200 people and took more than 200 others hostage. More than 47,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks since, according to Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry.
The Bibas boys were the youngest Israeli hostages, and the only children still held in captivity by Hamas after 100 hostages were released in a short-lived ceasefire agreement in November 2023.
Their father, Yarden, 34, who had been kidnapped separately and held in a different part of Gaza, was released on Feb. 1, through a new ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas.
Contributing: Michael Collins
TOPSHOT – A woman walks past a mural paiting representing the Bibas family, held by Hamas in Gaza since October 7, 2023, on a wall in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv on February 19, 2025, as a collective sense of anguish set in after Hamas said it would return their bodies. Hamas declared on February 18 it would hand over the bodies of four hostages, including the three Bibas family members, as part of the ongoing first phase of a ceasefire deal in Gaza. While their deaths are largely accepted as fact abroad after Hamas said they were killed in an Israeli air strike early in the war, Israel has never confirmed the claim. Yarden Bibas, the boys’ father and Shiri’s husband, was abducted separately on October 7, and was released from Gaza in a previous hostage-prisoner exchange on February 1, 2025. (Photo by Jack GUEZ / AFP) (Photo by JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images)
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Shiri Bibas’ body not returned; Israel received ‘anonymous’ body
