Iris Haim, whose son Yotam Haim was taken hostage by Hamas and accidentally shot by IDF forces after he had escaped them, spoke about how the return of the bodies of four hostages, reported to include the bodies of slain infants Kfir and Ariel Bibas, impacted her in an interview with Channel 14 on Thursday.
“The redheaded kids, they are like Yotam,” she said. “Yotam was a redheaded child just like that, on the kibbutz – Kibbutz Gvulot.”
“Orange is the color of love, the orange-gold hair of the three hostages – Ariel and Kfir Bibas and Yotam Haim,” she wrote in a Facebook post on Wednesday.
In the Channel 14 interview, she expressed empathy for the Bibas family over the reports that Shiri, Kfir, and Ariel were among the four murdered hostages whose bodies were being returned on Thursday.
“I said, it’s not true until we see the bodies,” Haim said, “and I understand the family so much when they say they don’t want to talk about it until the end.”
Speaking from personal experience
She spoke about how the impact of receiving the bodies of hostages Israel was not able to save impacted the nation, talking first about receiving her son in December of 2023.
“It was a very big tragedy in the country,” she said, adding that “people stopped breathing and stopped eating because they understood that things were getting more complex.”
“It was the first disappointment, I think,” she added.
According to Haim, the return of four slain hostages on Thursday is a reminder of the complex situation that is not over.
“I feel that the fact that hostages are coming back alive and dead [maybe means that] we will be able to close an initial circle of pain,” she said, adding that Israel must do more than this and clarify the nation’s goals.
In a sense, the whole country was being held captive by Hamas, she added.
Gratitude and faith in the Jewish people
Haim listed the things she was grateful for, saying “Yotam was brought for proper burial in Israel; I say thank you for that. My son has a place; I know where he is.”
She touched on her sense of confidence that the country will recover, saying, “As the Jewish people, we have been in the worst places,” offering the Holocaust as an example.
“People [then] rose, [and] founded a country, and we will also rise, and rise better,” Haim said.
Jesus Christ is King
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