A documentary film on the Bibas family, murdered by Hamas in Gaza, premiered in Buenos Aires on Wednesday evening.
“Bibas: Murdered for Being Jewish” (“Bibas: asesinados por ser judíos”) serves as a tool for documenting the truth and commemorating the memory of the Bibas family members who were kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz during the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre. Mother Shiri and her young children Kfir and Ariel were brutally murdered in Hamas captivity.
The documentary, the work of Argentine journalist Alfredo Leuco in collaboration with director Mariana Bellini and producer and journalist Gabriel Ben-Tasgal, is the product of more than a year of research and testimony collection.
The film opens with chilling scenes from the terrorists’ cameras, showing Shiri embracing her sons, four-year-old Ariel and nine-month-old Kfir.
“I wanted to help Israel,” Leuco explained in an interview with the Infobae website. “To do something, pick oranges or something like that. My friends told me I should do what I do best, and that’s how the idea arose to create a documentary film about the tragedy of the Bibas family.”
The documentary traces the family’s story starting from the morning of Oct. 7, when Hamas gunmen raided Nir Oz, and shows how the family members were abducted.
Yarden, Shiri’s husband, was taken by Hamas, while Shiri and the children were separated from him and taken by another group of terrorists.
On the same day, Shiri’s parents, Yossi and Margit Silberman, were murdered in their home in Nir Oz. (Yossi Silberman was originally from Argentina.)
The film also features Argentinian-born Ofelia Roitman, 77, who was kidnapped from Nir Oz and later released. She testified that she saw Shiri driven by on a motorcycle. “She was very pale and I saw tears,” Roitman said.
Yarden‘s release from captivity after 484 days and his search for his family are conveyed with emotional intensity. He describes the disturbing process of identifying bodies, which included deliberate deception by Hamas, which first released the body of a woman who was not Shiri or any other Israeli hostage, before handing over her remains.
Ultimately, after nearly a year and a half, the bodies of Shiri and her children were definitively identified, with the autopsies determining that the children were murdered first.
The funeral of Shiri and her sons is presented in the film as a display of grief and hope, as thousands of people accompany the coffins in a long procession, from a funeral home in Rishon Letzion, near Tel Aviv, to the Tsoher Regional Cemetery, near Nir Oz. In a breathtaking scene, Yarden is seen standing over their fresh grave and saying, “Sorry, Shiri, I couldn’t protect you.”
The film does not settle for describing the events alone, but rather emphasizes the human and ideological dimensions of the attack.
It includes testimonies from close family members, such as Dana, Shiri’s sister, who tearfully recounts the last messages she received from the family and her walk among the ruins of their parents’ burned house.
“At first they were calm, and then at some point they just stopped answering,” she recounts. “The phone showed that it was in Gaza, but my parents were burned to death here.
“We discovered this only after 15 days, following forensic examination of the house remains. Only my father’s grill remained standing, as a sad symbol of his Argentine background,” Dana says.
The film presents the contrast between the kibbutz residents’ belief in coexistence and the betrayal by their Palestinian neighbors from Gaza, who, according to testimonies, raided the kibbutz alongside the terrorists to loot property.
The documentary received support from Keren Hayesod Latin America, Spain and Portugal, which announced the establishment of a kindergarten in Israel in memory of the Bibas family.
Originally published by Israel Hayom.
