“There’s nothing – literally nothing – that they won’t accuse us of weaponizing," investigative journalist Eitan Fischberger wrote on X/Twit
By JOSEPH NICHOL
On February 1, the world watched as Yarden Bibas was released from Hamas captivity after over 15 months. On the morning of the October 7 massacre, terrorists kidnapped him and his wife, Shiri, and their two small children, Ariel and Kfir.
The fate of Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir is unknown, but there are grave concerns for their lives and indications that they did not survive.
Every Israeli, and indeed, nearly every Jew, knows their names and faces. The suffering of the Bibas family has become a symbol of the human and national disaster that Hamas inflicted on Israelis on that fateful day. Yet on the very same day that Yarden was released, Israelis were accused of “weaponizing” his family’s suffering.
Muhammad Shehada, for instance, wrote an article – in Mehdi Hasan’s publication, Zeteo, (big surprise) – titled “Is Israel Weaponizing the Tragic Deaths of the Bibas Children?” He appears to link the “fervent hopes and prayers” of Israelis for the Bibas family to perceived “malicious intent” on the part of the Israeli government.
For Shehada, the national sorrow for the Bibas family is not a normal human response to an atrocity on innocents. It’s a weapon, a “ticking time bomb,” in his words.
Across the anti-Israel sphere, people argue that the outpouring of grief over the Bibas family is an organized propaganda operation designed to “lay the groundwork” for torpedoing the ongoing hostage-ceasefire deal. Israelis cannot grieve. There must be a malicious, ulterior motive.
This pattern is not unique to the tragedy of the Bibas family. Investigative journalist Eitan Fischberger provided several examples of this phenomenon in a post on X/Twitter. He wrote, “There’s nothing – literally nothing – that they won’t accuse us of weaponizing.”
