Nowhere is the failure of the International Red Cross Red Cross more vivid than in its abandonment of the most vulnerable hostages – Shiri Bibas and her two red head kids!
By Jonathan Feldstein
Three more Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza for 491 days were released last week. The three men returned home emaciated, gaunt, and with signs of suffering from severe malnourishment including complex cardiac issues and infections. Seeing them paraded by Hamas in a dehumanizing public spectacle before thousands of armed terrorists and jeering “innocent civilians”, it was impossible to avoid the analogy with the Holocaust survivors of 80 years ago. In addition to deliberate starvation, there are multiple reports of the hostages’ physical and psychological torture, and sexual abuse. The massacre on October 7, 2023, that is correctly noted as the largest slaughter of Jews on any one day since the Holocaust, has now seen men and women returning, surviving unspeakable horrors, and looking the same as the victims from 1945.
Waiting in the wings as a spectator, the International Red Cross (ICRC) has justifiably faced widespread Israeli criticism and public ridicule. For nearly 500 days, the ICRC has stood idly by and were complicit, inter alia, in the following:
– never once visiting or checking on the status of any one of the 251 hostages kidnapped 16 months earlier on October 7, 2023
– failed to deliver medical supplies to any hostages
– never pursued to find out the condition of the hostages to advise their worried families
– insensitively advised family members of hostages that they should show concern for the Gazans
– enabled and participated in Hamas’ war crimes and crimes against humanity
One could be forgiven for thinking that the ICRC was contending to win “Best Supporting Actor in a Real-Life Horror Movie”.
Nowhere are the Red Cross’ failures and abandonment of the hostages more vivid than regarding the most vulnerable among them including dozens of women and children, and even elderly Holocaust survivors. Nowhere among the most vulnerable is this more evident than the Bibas family whose father, Yarden, was released a week ago after an unbearable 16 months of captivity. Remaining in cruel captivity are Yarden’s wife, Shiri, and their two beautiful red-headed sons, Ariel (4) and Kfir who were aged 4 and 9 months respectively at the time of their capture and have not been heard from since. The terrorists not only kidnapped the entire Bibas family, but made sure to film the terror in Shiri’s eyes, and Ariel screaming in fear, from multiple angles. Surely, the Red Cross would and should have advocated for the release of the Bibas family long ago, and insisted on visiting the little boys to check on their wellbeing. They have done nothing. Simply, the Red Cross abandoned the red heads.
“Come now, Jonathan. Surely you must be exaggerating,” you might think. No, the facts are incontrovertible. In fact, it gets worse. Just look at the spectacle to which the Red Cross has become party.Upon the release of the hostages, Red Cross representatives have willingly participated in a grotesque public signing of a Hamas ‘certificate of release’. Did nobody in the Red Cross, anywhere in the world, say:
“No, we will not participate in your continued dehumanization of the hostages.”
In every case of the hostages being released, how is it that the Red Cross has allowed armed Hamas terrorists to surround and climb on top of the vehicles carrying the hostages to freedom, threatening and tormenting their victims even once they are out of Hamas clutches?
Why does the Red Cross transport the hostages in vehicles with clear glass windows, a vile invasion of privacy of people who have endured so much suffering, and providing no security for the released hostages from the bloodthirsty mobs for whom one extra, “Allah Akbar” could trigger a deadly lynch.
Essentially, the Red Cross has been party to 251 war crimes, from day one, every day. In the first 50 days alone, that’s 12,500 war crimes. For the remaining 76 hostages, that’s nearly 38,000 cumulative days of war crimes to which the Red Cross has been complicit and has done nothing.
As Rolene Marks, an international journalist and media specialist noted:
“The Red Cross is complicit in crimes against humanity, including starvation and torture of hostages. They have failed their mandate, not provided medicine, not demanded welfare checks, or done anything to rase awareness of or advocate for the hostages. They failed the Jewish people during the Holocaust and have failed the Jewish people today.”
Indeed, comparisons to the Holocaust are not just because of the visual signs of starvation of the survivors. Hiding behind a mask of “neutrality” the Red Cross continues to carry the shame of its complacency with the Nazi’s murder of six million Jews. During the Holocaust, as it maintained a relationship with the Third Reich, the ICRC failed to denounce Nazi atrocities, and even provided an immoral cover up for them.
Throughout Nazi Europe, the ICRC only visited a few concentration camps under heavily controlled conditions. The most infamous visit occurred in June 1944 at Theresienstadt, staged by the Nazis to deceive the international community. As a result, the Red Cross issued a misleadingly and deceitful positive report that contributed to inaction, and the slaughter of millions more.
By 1942, detailed reports about the mass extermination of Jews had reached the ICRC. A key moment came in 1944 when two Slovak Jewish escapees from Auschwitz, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, provided a comprehensive report on the camps function as a death factory. Despite this evidence, the ICRC largely remained silent.
After the war, the ICRC was primarily focused on helping prisoners of war, but not Jews and other Holocaust victims who were classified as civilians, claiming they were outside its mandate. Only in 1995, ICRC President, Cornelio Sommaruga issued an apology, admitting the organization’s moral failure in not speaking out more forcefully.
Based on its notorious WWII record and its abysmal failure today vis-à-vis its inaction regarding the hostages in Gaza, it seems the ICRC never truly learned from its mistakes, whether due to a lack of caring or more likely – a deep seeded bias against Jewish victims.
In addition to justified widespread criticism of the ICRC, it has become subject of widespread ridicule. The best of these was a recent parody comparing the Red Cross to a rideshare app.
Today, Yarden Bibas faces the grim reality that his wife and sons may have been murdered. Of course, we don’t know because Hamas has never been forced to provide a list of the hostages and their status, and the Red Cross abandoned its responsibility to ensure that at least this would happen.
Hillel Fuld, a global speaker, tech columnist, and startup marketing advisor commented:
“The Red Cross has stayed loyal to its historic moral bankruptcy. It should come as a surprise to no one that they completely failed to do their job as it pertains to the hostages. Somehow anyone with a moral compass hopes deep down that this time would be different, but it never is. Maybe Trump will do something about it like he’s done to so many deeply immoral organizations worldwide.”
Fuld’s brother, Ari, was stabbed to death in a 2018 terror attack, by a terrorist who was recently released in a hostage exchange.
With growing signs that the remaining live hostages are in a desperately dire physical and mental condition or could at any moment – at a whim – be executed by Hamas, one would expect that the Red Cross should be advocating for their welfare and demanding answers.
No, that is not the case.
Instead, far more important that their ‘costumes’ are pressed, waiting for the next hostage release spectacle so they can pose for pictures alongside the masked and armed Hamas terrorists.
Rather than insisting on the unconditional release of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir, the Red Cross are serving as props to the Hamas real life horror movie.
Some in Israel have called upon the ICRC not only to be held accountable and castigated for their careless, inept collaboration with Hamas, but to be defunded and shut down. This should expand to other national Red Cross societies, including the American Red Cross, which by their own inaction and lack of bold steps on their own, are also complacent in allowing the parent organization not to fulfill its own mandate.
Due to ICRC and other international inaction, the Genesis 123 Foundation has launched a global petition to pressure Hamas to release all the remaining hostages unconditionally.
About the writer:
Jonathan Feldstein - President of the US based non-profit Genesis123 Foundation whose mission is to build bridges between Jews and Christians – is a freelance writer whose articles appear in The Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel, Townhall, NorthJersey.com, Algemeiner Jornal, The Jewish Press, major Christian websites and more.
*Feature picture: A crowd surrounds Red Cross cars as they arrive at the site for the handover of Thai and Israeli hostages in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Thursday Jan. 30, 2025.(AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi).
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).