Top of Mind Thursday – February 20, 2025: Forever Young

You may have noticed that your Jewish friends and colleagues are not quite right today.

If they seem out of sorts and distracted, it may be because this morning, in a bizarre spectacle, Hamas returned the bodies of 4 murdered hostages to Israel.

This included one of the oldest hostages, Ofed Lifshitz, and the two youngest hostages, Ariel and Kfir Bibas, along with their mother Shiri.

For more than 500 days, Israelis and Jews around the world have been watching and waiting, hoping by some miraculous chance these babies—4 years old and 9 months old, respectively, when kidnapped—would be returned alive.

We knew the chances of two little red-haired boys being alive more than 16 months after their abduction was slim, yet we held on to hope.

Today, not only was their fate revealed, but the charade Hamas created to facilitate their return reinforced the horrific nature of their captors. The bodies were desecrated with Hamas propaganda in the coffins. The coffins were locked and turned over without keys to open them. There was even concern that the coffins might be boobytrapped with bombs, as these kind of tricks had already been used against the IDF in Gaza.

Even worse, Gazan families with children were brought to the transfer site to cheer as this spectacle unfolded—reinforcing again that there appear to be no innocent civilians in Gaza.

As horrible as today’s events were, these were not the only children murdered on October 7th. And they won’t be the only ones targeted for murder if Hamas is allowed to continue to thrive.

To quote former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir,

When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill theirs. Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.

Until then, unfortunately, too many children will die, forever young.

May the memories of those returned today, and all those who were killed since Oct 7th, be for a blessing.

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