Hamas victims Ariel and Kfir Bibas could've been me, or maybe you

Noah Rubin is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania. As a campus advocate for Israel and against antisemitism, he has testified before Congress and joined a lawsuit against the university alleging antisemitism.

The barbarity and scale of Oct. 7, 2023, was immense, so much so that many of the stories from that day have not been covered in the mainstream media. The American-Israeli Siman Tov family in Kibbutz Nir Oz, were all murdered in their own bedroom. Ranging in age from 2 to 35, they were burned alive.

Their neighbors, the Bibas family, were rather taken as hostages. Parents Yarden and Shiri, as well as Ariel, who was just 4, and Kfir, who was 10 months old, were taken hostage. It's not know precisely when their captors killed Shiri and her two sons, but Israeli authorities have determined the boys were strangled. Yarden was kept alive underneath Gaza, starved, beaten and psychologically tortured, for over 500 days. He returned to Israel as part of the hostages-for-terrorists exchange with Israel.