“This young child never celebrated a birthday, not with his parents, not with his grandparents and not with kids in kindergarten. He never celebrated a birthday,” Jimmy Miller, the cousin of Shiri Bibas, told JNS ahead of his nephew Kfir’s second birthday in captivity on Saturday.
On Oct. 7, 2023, the Bibas family, including mother Shiri, husband Yarden and their two children, Ariel, 4, and nine-month-old baby Kfir were snatched by Hamas terrorists from Nir Oz, a kibbutz less than a mile from the Gaza border.
On Feb. 19, 2024, the Israel Defense Forces aired undated video footage of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir being led away by their Hamas captors in the Gaza city of Khan Yunis.
“We never received any information except for that movie,” Miller told JNS.
While last year the family marked Kfir’s birthday at his kindergarten in Nir Oz as part of a press briefing organized by the Hostage and Missing Families Forum, this year the immediate family was not planning to organize anything, he said.
“We will give interviews to TV channels and be on Hostage Square [in Tel Aviv], but we won’t do anything special because the situation is very strange. We know nothing about them. We are really sad about the situation, about all the soldiers that are killed every day in Gaza, about the plight of the hostages,” said Miller.
“We will remember that it’s his birthday and we will hope to get good news in the next few days, but we will not do anything like last year. We still believe something good will happen, but after one year we don’t know what to expect,” he added.
As part of his effort to return his relatives, Miller told JNS that he gives interviews to TV and radio stations, and attends hostage rallies to “show everybody that it’s still very important to bring all of them home before it’s too late.”
Miller also periodically goes to the Knesset to campaign for the release of his loved ones. He told JNS he doesn’t put much trust in recent reports of a breakthrough in the talks between Israel and Hamas.
“The minute I see it happening, I will believe it. When you don’t expect anything, you don’t get disappointed and sad. I prefer not to get sad if nothing happens, but I really hope something will happen,” he said.
“It’s the time to seal a deal before it’s too late. If they wait more, we might only get bodies in nylon bags. It’s time to bring all the people that survived for so long back alive,” he continued.
“Everybody over there is a humanitarian case. If we keep waiting, nothing will happen,” he added.
