Little Kfir Bibas has spent a quarter of his life as a hostage, and there are many who want the world to forget him and Israel to abandon him.
This month, Kfir Bibas turns one year old. He has now spent a quarter of his young life as a captive of Hamas terrorists, assuming he is even still alive.
And it seems as if only Jews care.
Kfir was just nine months old when he was kidnapped on October 7, 2023, along with his four-year-old brother Ariel, his mother Shiri, and his father Yarden. He is the youngest of the 240 people who were abducted by the Hamas savages that terrible day.
After three months in captivity, likely in an underground tunnel built with cement provided by the international community, a baby like Kfir would have no memory of a time when he knew light and went unhungry. If his mother and brother are still with him, then hopefully he still knows love.
What has been revealed about the treatment and food received by those hostages who have been released leaves little hope the butchers of Hamas would provide the nutrition a growing infant needs.
Amazingly, Kfir’s first birthday came and went with little fanfare. The media has been largely silent. No large protests filled the streets of Western cities, demanding that Kfir be freed. The Red Cross has never once demanded that Hamas allow it to do its job and visit Kfir and check on his medical condition. He has been forgotten.
Kfir is forgotten because he is guilty of a terrible crime. An unforgiveable crime committed before he could learn to smile, let alone to walk and talk. The crime of being born a Jew.
Because Kfir is a Jewish baby, he is guilty of being an oppressor. Because he is a Jew, he is a colonizer, a thief, and a settler – despite his family's not living on land captured by Israel in 1967. Because he is a Jew, he is not worth caring about to many, and to others anything done against him is justified.
This is the evil way of thinking of those sociopaths who rip down posters of the hostages, of the protests and demonstrations in support of Hamas, and of UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who called a demand that Hamas release its hostages “unacceptable.”
There are many people in this world who want to abandon Kfir, his family, and all the other hostages to the non-existent mercy of Hamas, who will justify his kidnapping and even, God forbid, his murder. They will say that his fate is the unfortunate byproduct of Israel’s actions, as those despicable 34 student groups at Harvard University did immediately upon receiving the news of the horrors of October 7, or they will blame his parents for living in pre-1967 Israel, as if that is some sort of crime worthy of the death penalty.
That is why they march for an end to Israel’s military operation, but not for an end to any of Hamas’ atrocities. It is why they demand Israel surrender, but not that Hamas release a single innocent hostage.
This is why we, Israelis and Jews around the world, cannot forget Kfir or any of the other hostages still languishing in Gaza. The UN, the useless Red Cross, so-called human rights organizations, and the international community will not help the hostages, and they will not help us. Maybe in a few years they will look back on little Kfir the way they look back on Anne Frank, another Jewish child abandoned by a world which deems Jewish life to be cheap. By then it will be too late.
It is up to Israel to do everything in its power to get Kfir and all of the other hostages back. No one else will do it. No one else cares enough to try, not the Red Cross and certainly not the UN.
It is up to all of us to speak up for Kfir, because he cannot speak for himself. At just twelve months, he cannot tell what horrors he has endured in Gaza. The Red Cross will not speak for him, nor will the UN, Human Rights Watch, or Amnesty International. We must speak for him in the streets of New York and London, in the halls of Congress, and anywhere where there are still decent people whose hearts break at the suffering of innocent children.
This is the purpose for which the State of Israel was created. To ensure that no Jewish child is ever again forgotten or abandoned, no matter how much the world wishes to forget and dispose of them. In an uncaring world, there is one nation and one people that does care, and that must be us.
If we are not for our own children, no one else will be.