Ariel and Kfir Bibas. Photo: Hostages and Missing Families Forum

The most harrowing moment of the hostage releases so far came on the morning of Thursday, February 20, when the tragic fate of the Bibas children and their mother was all but confirmed.

From the outset, the faces of Shiri Bibas and her two red-haired sons became emblematic of the horror unleashed by Hamas on October 7, 2023. The footage of a terrified mother, desperately clutching Ariel, 4, and his baby brother Kfir, as a mob of armed Palestinian civilians closed in, made one thing clear: on that day, no Israeli was too young or too innocent to be spared.

Although Hamas’ disgusting tactics during the hostage exchanges had already shocked the world, what followed was worse.

Infinitely worse.

There were four black coffins — one each for Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas, and for Oded Lifshitz, who had also been kidnapped from Nir Oz (of course, we later learned that Shiri’s body wasn’t even in that casket). Behind them, the macabre scene was complete: an antisemitic mural, crudely depicting Israel’s prime minister as a blood-sucking vampire, loomed over the stage. It was the final indignity, as Hamas desecrated even the bodies of its most defenseless victims.

The international media covered Thursday morning’s appalling spectacle as they have all the others. While Israeli networks refuse to broadcast these grotesque propaganda displays, Western outlets continue to oblige.

It is difficult to imagine these same outlets uncritically airing the staged performances of any other terrorist group banned in their own countries.

But when Israel is the victim of terrorism, double standards always seem to apply.

For weeks, we have called out the media’s insistence on drawing a false moral equivalency between Israeli hostages — civilians kidnapped during Hamas’ massacre — and Palestinian prisoners released as part of the ceasefire agreement. Most of these prisoners are convicted terrorists, serving multiple life sentences for mass-casualty attacks stretching back to before the Second Intifada.

The worst media offenders have been Sky News, CNN, and the BBC. Last Thursday, Sky News stayed true to form, referring to the Bibas family and Oded Lifshitz as having been held in “Hamas custody.” As though an 85-year-old man, a mother, and her two children had been detained under some form of legitimate due process.

This, just days after Sky referred to Palestinian prisoners—many of them convicted terrorists—as “hostages.”

This time, however, it was what the media didn’t say that was most revealing.

In past hostage-prisoner exchanges, major media outlets have not been shy about indulging Hamas’ propaganda. CNN reported that Hamas had gifted hostages’ families “memorabilia,” including an hourglass ominously meant for the mother of a hostage still held in Gaza — an implicit threat on his life.

The New York Times, for its part, described Hamas’ weekly ritual of torturing and humiliating Israeli captives as mere “theatrics” and even claimed the group had “toned down” its cruelty in the last exchange.

Last Thursday, the Times refrained from suggesting Hamas had toned down its performance. Instead, like so many other publications, it failed to acknowledge the full horror of what unfolded.

Thousands of Palestinian civilians gathered to witness the scene. Men perched on plastic lawn chairs, smoking hookah pipes. Families — mothers in headscarves, fathers cradling toddlers — watched from the crowd. There was music. There was singing.

It was not just the presence of the four coffins that made the spectacle an echo of the savagery of October 7. It was the festive atmosphere — the casual, almost celebratory way a community gathered to watch a terrorist group display the bodies of murdered Jews. It is a society so desensitized to terroristic violence that even the sight of coffins holding two dead babies did not shock and did not horrify.

Quite the opposite. It was a cause for celebration.

The mothers and fathers of Gaza brought their children to watch. To gawk. To clap. At the sight of dead Jews.

Mainstream media outlets barely acknowledged the sheer depravity of the spectacle, offering only the most muted references to the macabre show in Khan Yunis.

Sky News, for instance, summarized the scene with an almost clinical detachment: “Four black coffins were displayed on a stage” before being “put into vehicles and driven away as masked members of Hamas and other factions looked on.” It’s a bizarrely sanitized description for what was, in reality, a horrifying public exhibition of murdered civilians.

CNN at least had the journalistic integrity to acknowledge the “propaganda backdrop with slogans in Arabic, Hebrew, and English” — but conspicuously failed to mention the crude mural of Netanyahu as a blood-sucking vampire looming over the coffins.

ABC News cropped its accompanying photo so that only one Hamas terrorist remained in the frame, reducing the entire event to just two paragraphs — one of which described a Red Cross official “signing documents” as part of the so-called handover.

References to the crowd were fleeting. If mentioned at all, it was merely as “crowds gathered,” with no photographs to accompany the words. One of the most honest assessments came from an AFP report, but even then, it was buried in the final paragraph:

“Large speakers blasted chants, as children and youth pressed themselves around a table where fighters displayed a large automatic rifle and its long ammunition belt, as well as anti-tank mines.”

Yet not a single major news outlet thought it relevant to report that Hamas had invited families to watch –and that they eagerly did, gathering with music and celebration. Not a single journalist spoke of the carnivalesque atmosphere. Not a single reporter noted the chilling detail that all four coffins were the same size, as though a child-sized casket would have made the heartbreak too explicit.

Israel has been repeatedly criticized for its supposed lack of a “day-after” plan for Gaza, for failing to put forward a roadmap that would lead to Palestinian statehood.

But Thursday morning’s gruesome display — more even than the horrors of October 7 — provides the most unflinching answer to that demand: Israel cannot be expected to build a future alongside those who see the murder of its civilians as family entertainment.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.