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While the Trump administration did not issue an official statement following the revelation that what was believed to be the body of Shiri Bibas was a Gazan woman, Adam Boehler, President Donald Trump's envoy for hostage affairs, called Hamas’s actions “horrific” and a “clear violation” of the cease-fire.
“If I were them, I’d release everybody or they are going to face total annihilation,” he warned in an interview with Anderson Cooper on CNN.
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Adam Boehler speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House, April 14, 2020, in Washington
(Photo: AP)
Boehler added that Israel had informed senior U.S. officials in advance that the remains were not those of Shiri and that forensic evidence confirmed her sons, Ariel and Kfir, were brutally murdered in November 2023 in captivity.
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“I don’t know what [Hamas] thought when they put the body of somebody else in a coffin and said that it was the mother of two kids who had been brutally murdered, whether they thought Israel wouldn’t find that out or not, but it’s absolutely stunning,” he said.
Condemnations for the murder of the children arrived from across the globe. Germany’s ambassador to Israel Steffen Seibert said: “The unbearable has been confirmed: Ariel and Kfir Bibas, two small German citizens, were taken by ruthless terrorists and killed in captivity." Kfir and Ariel's father, Yarden, is a German citizen.
"Let us remember them as they were—alive, young, radiant, and full of promise. What happened to Shiri? On top of everything else, Hamas are cruel liars," he added
British Ambassador to Israel Simon Walters said: “The Israeli authorities have now confirmed from forensic evidence that the little Bibas children were murdered in captivity. This is a gruesome new low, compounded by the failure to return the body of Shiri, their mother. May Kfir and Ariel rest in peace.”
First published: 13:48, 02.21.25