If anybody needed a reminder of how bestial Hamas is, they will get three tomorrow.

Tomorrow, Hamas will release hostages as part of the January 16 ceasefire deal—not living but dead bodies of the Bibas family. Shiri and her two sons, Ariel and Kfir, were kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, from Kibbutz Nir Oz. Shiri was 32, Ariel was 4, and Kfir was only 9 months old. The father, 34-year-old Yarden Bibas, was kidnapped separately that day and released by Hamas earlier this month.

Since 2023, the family’s fate was unknown. Hamas claimed Shiri and her children died in November that year from an Israeli air strike. Israel couldn’t confirm this. But in at least one instance, Hamas claimed a hostage was dead when she was alive and later rescued by Israel. Hamas has also executed hostages while blaming Israel for their deaths. Even if this was a case of friendly fire, the family wouldn’t have been in that position if Hamas hadn’t kidnapped them.

Either way, the Bibas boys prove Hamas is a murderer of babies.

None of this should surprise anybody. Hamas massacred many children on October 7. It uses its own children as human shields by using schools, day cares and similar facilities as military infrastructure.

But it demonstrates the barbarism at the heart of Hamas’s ideology and war aims. The Israel-Hamas War is not a gentlemanly war of the 18th century. It is genocide against the Jews. Hamas vows to cleanse Israel of Jews “from the river to the sea.”

This is the terrorist group the United States forced the Israeli government to do business with in January. This is the terrorist group that now lives to fight another day.

The U.S. has since shifted its position and said Israel is free to break the ceasefire agreement if it chooses to. Yet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is still following through.

Public Opinion

Public opinion gives him little choice. An early January poll by the Jewish People Policy Institute suggested 64 percent of Israelis supported “releasing terrorists with ‘blood on their hands’” if it meant getting hostages home. Earlier this month, a poll by Israel’s Channel 12 suggested 70 percent of Israelis back “phase 2” of the hostage deal, which hypothetically means a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in exchange for the remaining hostages. Another poll by the Israeli Broadcasting Authority suggested a full 55 percent of Israelis support phase 2 even if it means leaving Hamas in power.

Israel has been in national trauma for over a year. The Israeli public is getting restless over a never-ending war with little-to-no updates on their loved ones. The few updates they do get come from Hamas show the hostages languishing in Gaza’s tunnels.

But do the Israeli people realize the ceasefire is a deal with the devil?

Even when giving up dead bodies, Hamas expects Israel to release Palestinian prisoners. Israel has already released hundreds for the hostages freed since January.

The January poll shows many Israelis agree to this kind of ransom payment. “Would they feel that way,” Jeff Jacoby wrote for the Boston Globe, “if they knew in advance exactly which innocent victims would lose their lives, limbs or liberty at the hands of the violent prisoners to be exchanged for (some of) the hostages? Does the moral obligation to redeem captives require Israel to, in effect, condemn innumerable others to death—or fates worse than death?”

This is not purely a hypothetical scenario. Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s now-dead governor in Gaza and the mastermind of the October 7 attacks, was released in a similar prisoner swap. Many extremely dangerous people were released—equivalent to the U.S. releasing the Boston bomber or cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

The Israelis’ pain is real. Anybody in the position of the hostages’ family members would do anything to get their loved ones back. But when one gives into the blackmailer, it’s only a matter a time before the blackmailer comes back for more, threatening even greater evil for noncompliance.

A Biblical Perspective

The Bible prophesies that Israel will suffer even more horrendous trials at the hands of the Palestinians. Hosea 5:13 reads: “When Ephraim saw his sickness, and Judah saw his wound, then went Ephraim to the Assyrian, and sent to king Jareb: yet could he not heal you, nor cure you of your wound.”

The original Hebrew word translated as “wound” can mean either a bandage or remedy (see Strong’s Concordance and Gesenius’ Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon). Hosea implies a remedy that is also a wound.

“The Jews are prophesied here to recognize a deep wound in their body politic,” Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote in our Trumpet issue on the October 7 attacks. “I have been writing for over 20 years that this wound represents the Middle East peace process, by which Israel has surrendered its own land in the vain hope of appeasing its enemies. … Now the world has watched as Hamas has soaked itself and Jewish bodies of men, women, children and babies in blood! The slaughter of [1,200] Israelis in a single attack planned and launched from Gaza is bitter evidence of what a wound that farcical ‘peace process’ has been!”

Hosea mentions Judah turning to Assyria, the ancestral peoples of modern Germany, to fix this “wound.” (See here for more information.) Yet as the prophecy states, this will not heal anything.

“In the face of a tragedy such as this,” Mr. Flurry continued, “where does Israel turn for help? Their own Bible repeatedly shows that God wants to be our refuge and help in times of trouble. He wants us looking to and trusting Him! But Israel turns instead to unstable man—even those who have proved themselves not to have Israel’s interests at heart.”

The unfortunate fate of the Bibas family shows where this thinking has led Israel. The more Israel continues down this path, the worse its trials will be.

However, the same Bible that prophesies of Israel’s wound also points to the solution to its problems. Events like what we’re seeing in Gaza ultimately point to God teaching lessons to Israel and all mankind. And God prophesies that, one way or another, man will learn the lesson.

To learn more, read Mr. Flurry’s article “A Sign of Worse to Come.”