Pamela B. Paresky
Psychology Today, Mar. 3, 2025
“Across Israel, people have been trapped in a version of the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, holding in mind both the possibility that hostages are alive and that they are dead.”
The first sign that Israeli hostage Yarden Bibas was alive in Gaza came when Hamas released a video taken on November 30, 2023. On that day, a Hamas terrorist informed hostage Nili Margolit, from Kibbutz Nir Oz, the same ravaged community from which Bibas and 70 others were kidnapped, that she was going home. But first, she told me, the terrorist instructed her to tell Bibas that his wife and children had been killed in an Israeli airstrike. After learning of their deaths, Bibas was to perform in a propaganda video. If he didn’t, the terrorist warned Margolit, she would not be released.
At the time, they couldn’t know what was true. But Margolit told me she was afraid Bibas would not survive if he thought Shiri and the boys were dead. Courageously, she refused to participate in his psychological torture. In the end, a terrorist told Bibas that his wife and children had been killed (which was true) by an Israeli airstrike (which was a lie). Then, the terrorist filmed the sobbing Bibas blaming Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister. As soon as the video was captured, Margolit was released. She had spent 50 days in the tunnel.
For more than a year after she was freed, until Hamas paraded Bibas in front of a jeering crowd in Gaza, his family in Israel didn’t know whether he was alive, let alone whether he would ever come home.
Shortly after his release on February 1, 2025, Bibas buried his wife and children. After their bodies were forensically examined, he gave authorities permission to reveal that the three had been strangled to death in November 2023 —their bodies mangled after their murders to mimic injuries from falling rubble.
The Bibas family’s horrific story is widely known. But there are less well known stories of families waiting for loved ones they might never see again, some having never seen signs of life. Other families buried charred bits of loved ones and will never know what happened when they died. …SOURCE