It's week 6 and we're rattled

The tragedy of the Bibas family, reunions for six more hostages, and snow that won't fall

These are days when everything feels מטלטלת, מזועזע — the news rattles and shakes you. It’s the term that people keep on using, and it fits.

Michael Levy, brother of freed hostage Or Levy, whose wife Eynav was killed in the so-called ‘מגונית המוות,’ the roadside shelter of death, told me he was rattled to see his brother released in a skeletal, barely walking condition.

Varda Ben Baruch, the elegant, always-present grandmother of hostage Edan Alexander, told me yesterday how rattled she was by the latest Hamas propaganda video, showing hostages Evyatar David and Guy Gilboa Dalal, filmed as they were forced to watch the releases of the latest hostages.

It’s all impossible to process.

Last Thursday, we wept over the released bodies of four hostages, Oded Lifshitz, 84, from Nir Oz, and then Ariel Bibas, 4, Kfir Bibas, 10 months, and a coffin that we thought held the boys’ mother, Shiri.

I went to bed late Thursday night, expecting that the body of Shiri Bibas would be identified. But I woke up on Friday to find out that the coffin held the body of an unidentified woman, placed there by Hamas as another twist of the knife.

Shiri’s body was sent over the border in the middle of the night on Friday. I found out later that people got out of their beds on the cold February night, at 2 a.m., to stand with flags and line the road leading to the Tel Aviv forensics institute, in order to accompany Shiri’s body on that portion of her return home.

And then six more living hostages returned home on Saturday, including two Israelis that had been held by Hamas for ten years. Avera Mengistu, whose name means life, is an Ethiopian-Israeli suffering from mental illness who had crossed into Gaza on his own, and then been held there. Hisham al-Sayed, a Bedouin Israeli, has a similar story about how he walked into Gaza, and his father is now shouting to the world about how Hamas treated his son, who returned a broken man, unable to speak or express himself. It’s not, he said, the Moslem way. No, I can’t imagine it is.

Three of Saturday’s released hostages included survivors of the Nova desert rave, Eliya Cohen, Omer Shem-Tov and Omer Wenkert, held for 15 months, in inhumane conditions, and now, suddenly, their two-dimensional poster images miraculously came to life as they returned to the loving arms of their families.

Tal Shoham, a married father of two taken separately from his family as they visited with family in Kibbutz Be’eri, also returned, released to life, reunited with his two little kids, his wife, his parents and his siblings.

The tides turned again as we found out some of the most basic details about how the little Bibas boys and their mother, Shiri, were killed in November 2023, murdered with the terrorists’ bare hands.

What to do? How do you keep on moving forward with this kind of news? It rattles your very soul.

It’s hard. It’s hard not to think about Yarden Bibas and how he will possibly find a way forward. I think about Shiri’s sister a lot, having to mourn her parents and only sibling.

I’m rattled, and I find myself taking walks. Sometimes it’s a 30-minute walk from one of the Tel Aviv train station to an interview and back again. Sometimes it’s for a quick errand down the block. It’s not part of any workout, it’s just a way to clear my head.

At home, it’s often with our dog Suki, and we head to a nearby field, where we keep searching for the bright red petals of wild anemones, but often have to make do with the pink blossoms of almond trees, still in bloom.

This morning, it was in the cold crisp air of the current cold snap, with a few snowflakes drifting down from the gray skies. I had hopes for much more of a snowfall, for a snowday or even half of one that would coat our roads and sidewalks in white, even for part of the day, and blanket everything in peace and quiet, purifying everything, offering a kind of fresh start, even if only temporary.

We didn’t get that, but Suki and I made our way to the field, a few idle snowflakes landing on my sleeve, their shapes as sharp and exact as if I’d drawn them myself.

It wasn’t a snowstorm, not even flurries really, but it offered something new and delicate, floating down from the sky, a start to another day, pushing forward until we find ourselves on the other side of this thing.