BIRTHDAY BOY
Orange balloons, teddy bear cake & desperate prayers…Solemn 1st birthday held for Kfir Bibas 101 days after Hamas kidnap
As he turns one, the baby would have spent a third of his life as a hostage
A SOMBER birthday ceremony was held for Hamas's youngest hostage Kfir Bibas, who will turn one while held captive in Gaza.
Orange balloons - a nod to Kfir's ginger hair - a teddy bear cake and his pictures stood in the abandoned Nir Oz kindergarten, 101 days after terrorists kidnapped him on October 7.
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Kfir's first birthday is on Thursday, at which point the baby would have spent a third of his life as a hostage.
He was only eight months old when Hamas terrorists stormed stormed Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7 in their cross-border bloodbath in Israel.
Kfir has since become Hamas's youngest out of 240 people kidnapped by the terror group and taken back to Gaza as captives.
Hamas has said that Kfir, his four-year-old brother Ariel and their mother Shiri were killed in the Israeli offensive that ensued, while their father, Yarden, survived.
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But relatives and friends back home have refused to let hope die for the whole family's safe recovery.
"We're marking a birthday for a kid who's not here," Shiri's cousin, Yosi Shnaider, told Reuters ahead of baby Kfir's birthday.
"We make him a cake, we put up balloons, pictures, and blessings and everything and he's not here. It's crazy."
In December, baby Kfir was meant to be released alongside his mum and brother before terrorists "decided not to do this", the IDF said.
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Meanwhile, Nir Oz has been frozen in time and trauma, with more than a quarter of residents either killed or taken captive, and survivors fleeing.
Nir Oz resident Sharon Alony Cunio and her three-year-old twin daughters Emma and Julie were freed last year.
Cunio's husband remains incommunicado in Gaza, however, with 131 other hostages.
Worry for their fate grips a country that, after the worst attack in its history, has settled into the grim resolve of war - especially as Israeli officials, based on various sources of information, say at least 25 hostages have died in captivity.
"I can't sleep. I suffer from nightmares. The girls ask about their father constantly," said Cunio, who visited her now-burned out home in the formerly placid agricultural collective.
"I wake up in the morning with one purpose only - David made me promise him that I will fight for him. That I will scream his despair to the world as he is unable to do so."
Israel recovered around half of the hostages in a November truce, among them Irish-Israeli Emily Hand, who also spent her birthday while held captive by Hamas before she was set free.
Cakes were laid out on a table on what should have been one of the happiest days of the nine-year-old's child’s life.
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By the time she was released, the bubbly Disney fan, who had loved to sing and dance, was rail-thin, glassy-eyed, frightened of loud noises and too scared to speak.
She spent 50 harrowing days dodging bullets as Hamas terrorists herded her between houses in Gaza.
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