The late Elie Wiesel, the famed essayist and survivor of Adolf Hitler’s camps, once described the Holocaust as “an indictment of our present world.” Eight decades later, that verdict was renewed when another group of totalitarian antisemites put on a grotesque display. Hamas, the U.S.-designated terrorist group that rules Gaza, perpetrated the largest slaughter of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust on Oct. 7, 2023.
But Hamas has done something more. The Iranian proxy has struck at the very heart of Jewish life: the family unit. And as a new report argues, it is not only wholly intentional but a key part of the terrorist organization’s strategy.
On Feb. 20, Hamas released the remains of three hostages who had been kidnapped in its Oct. 7 invasion of Israel, brought to Gaza, and murdered in captivity. One, Oded Lifshitz, was an elderly peace activist and great-grandfather who helped transport sick Palestinians in Gaza to Israel for medical care. The other two dead “hostages” were children: Ariel Bibas, who was 4 when he was taken, and his 9-month-old baby brother, Kfir.
A subsequent forensic investigation concluded that the two children were murdered with bare hands shortly after they were brought to Gaza. Hamas tortured their father, Yarden, as it held him captive, telling him that an Israeli airstrike had killed his wife and children. The forensic investigation would show that the bodies of the two children were desecrated in an attempt to give credence to this lie.
The remains of Lifshitz and the Bibas children were released as part of a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. But the terrorist group violated the terms of that deal. Hamas was supposed to return the body of Shiri Bibas, mother to Kfir and Ariel, along with her murdered children but instead put the remains of an unidentified woman in Shiri’s coffin — a coffin that was emblazoned in Arabic with the phrase “taken prisoner on October 7.”
But this wasn’t all. In widely released footage that shocked many observers unfamiliar with the terrorist group’s barbarism, Hamas and throngs of Palestinians in Gaza took to the streets to celebrate the murder of a great-grandfather and two children. Young Palestinian children even defaced images of the Bibas family that Hamas had printed and displayed to showcase its “victory.” Reporters covering the spectacle didn’t ask how, despite enduring a supposed famine and brutal conditions, Hamas had the means to carry out a major production, replete with large banners with graphic design. Nor did they ruminate on the deep sickness revealed by the celebration of kidnapping and murdering children who, like most children, liked to dress up as superheroes.
Palestinians in Gaza cheered while holding cellphones to capture the moment. The bodies of the murdered were returned in coffins with locks that intentionally didn’t work. The actual remains of Shiri Bibas were only returned in the coming days after an outcry from Israeli and American officials. It was a final indignity to a family and a nation that had suffered so much.
As the writer Seth Mandel observed: “The crimes against the Bibas family are indeed the symbol of the anti-civilization menace that is Hamas — but also of the cowardice of the political and cultural leaders of the enlightened West.” President Donald Trump condemned the scene as “unbelievable” and “barbaric.” But others, including those who posit themselves to be our moral betters, expressed other sentiments.
Wiesel famously wrote that “the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference,” but far from being indifferent, many Western elites, including a shocking number of celebrities, journalists, and Ivy League students and professors, have been enraptured with Hamas’s ambitions to carry out another genocide of Jews and wipe the world’s sole Jewish state off the map. Indeed, shortly after Hamas paraded around the corpses of murdered children and an elderly peace activist, millionaire rockstar Billie Joe Armstrong of the band Green Day cloaked himself in a Palestinian flag in solidarity. The next week, the Washington Post’s Karen Attiah defended retweeting a post celebrating the Oct. 7 massacre.
Hamas couldn’t do what it does — murder innocents while using its own people as human shields — without useful idiots in the West acting as its enablers. They are the Renfields serving the bloodthirsty monster in Gaza. A civilized society should cast such people out — not award them columns, ad space, book deals, and tenure. That the opposite has occurred bodes poorly for the future of civilization itself.
What happened to the Bibas family, to Lifshitz, and to thousands of others is emblematic of Hamas’s war aim. The horrors evidenced by Hamas’s display illustrate the terrorist group’s objective: the destruction of Israel and the genocide of Jewry. And that destruction begins with the core of civilization: the family unit. This is what Hamas and its supporters, both in Gaza and the West, are celebrating when they deface pictures of a 9-month-old baby taken into darkness and beaten and murdered in cold blood.
Hamas, a recent study argues, has invented a new war crime: kinocide. In December 2024, the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes Against Women and Children published a lengthy report titled “Kinocide: Uncovering the Weaponization of Families on October 7, 2023.” The commission is led by Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a 2024 Israel Prize laureate and expert in human rights and international law. The commission was founded to document, research, and raise international awareness of “the war crimes and gender-based violence committed by Hamas and their collaborators during their brutal attack on Israel.” A distinguished group of contributors, including the former attorney general of Canada, Irwin Cotler, among others, helped compile the report.
The commission’s conclusions are both stark and haunting. As one of its members, Yuval Shany, observed:
“The Commission’s report took upon itself the difficult, but critically important, task of uttering part of the unspeakable, and developing a suitable term for capturing some of its evil essence — kinocide. Like genocide, which is directed against a group of people, kinocide represents an attack against a group, using the family relationship holding between family members and their emotional, identity, cultural, symbolic, material and other bonds, as a way to maximize the intended harm of the attack.”
As Shany noted: “By describing this cruel practice and giving it a name, the Commission has taken an important step in the direction of recognizing this terrible crime against humanity and formulating suitable legal and social responses to it.”
Indeed, naming the crime is important. In 1941, as news of the Holocaust began to trickle to the Allies, United Kingdom Prime Minister Winston Churchill warned in a radio broadcast: “We are in the presence of a crime without a name.” It would be years before a word was assigned to try to capture the scope and barbarity of the Nazis’ ambitions. As the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum pointed out, “At the time of the Holocaust, there was no legal definition for an atrocity on such an enormous scale.”
In 1944, the lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” to describe the crimes of the Nazis and their collaborators. Lemkin later worked on the legal team that prosecuted the Nuremberg tribunal, which sought to hold top Nazi officials to account. He would spend the rest of his short life — Lemkin died a haunted man before his 60th birthday — advocating international recognition, including by the United Nations, of the crime of genocide. Sadly, today’s U.N. has fallen far short of the hopes that Lemkin and others placed in it.
For its part, Hamas has long been clear about its genocidal ambitions. The group’s covenant, its founding document, calls for Israel’s destruction, declaring that “there is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by jihad.” Further, the charter explicitly rejects “international conferences” and “so-called peace solutions” for solving the “Palestinian problem” — which, Hamas makes clear, is the existence of any Jewish state on “Islamic Waqf land given to all generations of Muslims until the day of resurrection.” That is, the terrorist group’s war against Israel is religious in nature and not, as Washington Post columnists and ivory tower academics would allege, merely something that can be resolved by ceding some land. Rather, Hamas wants all of it. And it is willing to kidnap and murder babies and celebrate doing so to achieve its objective.
It is unsurprising then that Hamas targeted families in its war against the Jewish state. Palestinian terrorists have a long track record of doing precisely that. On March 26, 2001, for example, a terrorist intentionally shot a 10-month-old baby, Shalhevet Pass, while she was in her stroller. During an attack in 1979, Samir Kuntar crushed 4-year-old Einat Haran’s skull with the butt of his rifle after murdering her father in front of her. When Kuntar, who was released in a prisoner exchange decades later, finally met his end in 2015 while fighting for Hezbollah in Syria, the Washington Post called Kuntar a “militant” who had simply committed a “deadly attack.”
Such savagery against Jewish children in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland predates Israel’s 1948 recreation. In 1929, for example, ancient Jewish communities in Hebron and elsewhere were attacked. One policeman, RJ Cafferata, testified that he discovered “an Arab cutting off a child’s head with a sword.” Cafferata shot the man before he saw another armed with a dagger and “standing over a woman covered with blood.” Orphanages were targeted, and homes were set on fire. One eyewitness, David Hacohen, reported that in Safed, he saw victims stabbed “to pieces,” and he noted that the culprits had burst “into the orphanages” and “smashed the children’s heads and cut off their hands.”
But just as the Holocaust was distinguished from other crimes by the scope of its organized and industrial-scale slaughter, Oct. 7 marks a “chilling evolution in the conflict,” notes Dr. Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler. One supporter of the commission’s report, the Iranian dissident Masih Alinejad, pointed out that Hamas had “specially targeted families within residential communities.” These attacks, she notes, “were designed to destroy the family unit, to maximize the harm to families, and to wipe out these communities. The weaponization of families is neither new nor unique to the October 7 attack but it is time we recognized kinocide as a new international crime.”
And the evidence comes from Hamas itself.
The terrorist group proudly filmed its atrocities, often livestreaming the heinous murders of innocents in front of their family members. Hamas, the commission’s report concludes, made “strategic use” of digital and social media to “exert and intensify harm.” As Elkayam-Levy and Cotler noted:
“Parents were murdered in front of their children, children in front of their parents. Siblings were torn apart. Children, even infants, were gunned down in their bedrooms. Entire families were slaughtered. Many were burned alive. Hamas committed violent sexual crimes against women, men, and young girls, and tortured family members in front of each other before killing them or abducting them into Gaza.”
The testimonies of the survivors are horrific. One mother noted the “unbearable moment” when her son turned to her and asked, “Why didn’t they kill me?” after witnessing his father and brother being shot to death. One child recounted having to hide under his mother’s lifeless body. Terrorists murdered 18-year-old Maayan Idan in front of her father Tsachi, her mother Gali, her 11-year-old sister Yael, and her 9-year-old brother Shahar. The perpetrators then “commandeered the mother’s Facebook account and livestreamed the entire ordeal for the family’s loved ones to witness in real time. The video shows the family members clinging to one another as they digest the death of their daughter and sister.” Shahar begged the terrorists not to murder his father, only to be told, “Don’t worry. … I will kill him in another room.” Tsachi was then kidnapped and taken to Gaza. His remaining family members spent more than 500 days wondering about his fate before his body was returned in February 2025.
What happened to the Idan family is but one of many examples of “selective killing” committed by Hamas and its allies.
In Holit, for example, 4-year-old Negev Kaploun told his father how his mother, Adi, had tried to protect his 4-month-old brother Eshel from the perpetrators, and then “she was gone.” The children, the report notes, were kept alive, while the mother was shot and killed. The mother’s last words to her sons were, “Remember, Mommy loves you more than anything in the world.” After killing the boys’ mother in front of them, the terrorists then filmed themselves feeding and playing with Negev and Eshel, sharing it for propaganda purposes on social media.
In the village of Kfar Aza, terrorists shot and killed the Berdichevsky parents while leaving their “10-month-old twins to fend for themselves,” the study notes. An elderly grandmother was murdered in Nir Oz, and footage of her dead body was uploaded to her Facebook account for her family to find.
Ten-month-old Mila Cohen was shot in the head while still in her mother’s arms. Two-year-old Omer Siman Tov was burned alive after watching terrorists murder his parents.
Children were forced to hide in closets with their dead parents. Others were forced to try to give medical care to their wounded family members. Often, they watched them bleed to death.
Families were murdered in front of each other, often in their own homes. Many were murdered in the safest part of their houses: the “safe rooms” that many homes are required to have because of terrorists bent on murdering Jews en masse in the 21st century. Many communities were burned down, with loved ones often inside, their charred remains all that was left of what was once a happy home and a happy life. Indeed, the destruction was also “aimed at objects of sentimental value, including family photos, cherished mementos, and children’s toys.” Torturing and murdering pets, often in the presence of their owners, was also commonplace.
These are but some of the many stories of the many lives, big and small, that were brutally extinguished. The scope and scale of the savagery are unimaginable. Like past horrors, future generations will struggle to come to terms with such wanton barbarism. And they will condemn those who help make such horrors possible.
After the Holocaust, men like Lemkin placed their faith in international institutions like the U.N. Yet the U.N. itself is a collaborator, ably assisting today’s genocidal antisemites. Employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East even participated in the Oct. 7 massacre. UNRWA buildings have been used to hide terrorists and plot attacks, and U.N. employees held kidnapped hostages in their homes. Meanwhile, it was recently revealed that under Samantha Power, U.S. Agency for International Development funds went to Hamas. More than $2.1 billion of U.S. taxpayer money went to Hamas-controlled Gaza after Oct. 7. As Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) observed: “Essentially what the U.S. assistance to Gaza did was underwrite the ability for Hamas to survive until the ceasefire.”
Nor are the self-styled truth-tellers in the legacy media any better. News outlets such as the Washington Post and USA Today, among others, treat Hamas as a credible source, uncritically regurgitating casualty statistics supplied by the terrorist group. The BBC even had to scrap a faux documentary after it was revealed to be little more than Hamas propaganda.
During World War II, the Associated Press infamously collaborated with the Nazis in exchange for access. Strong evidence suggests that, up until recently, the Associated Press shared office space with Hamas operatives in Gaza. The press helped cover up a genocide then, and too many continue to do so now.
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“Not to transmit an experience,” Wiesel once wrote, “is to betray it.” For “without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.”
Hamas seeks to stamp out that future. Both the terrorist group and its enablers must be held to account.
Sean Durns is a senior research analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.