A Guardian article published in the early hours of Friday (Shiri Bibas not among returned bodies, Israel says, accusing Hamas of ‘serious violation’, Feb. 21), written by Helen Livingstone, was based on an IDF statement issued a couple of hours earlier. That statement pertained to Hamas’s handover, on Thursday, of the bodies of four Israeli hostages, Oded Lifshitz, 85, Shiri Bibas, 32, and her two children, Ariel, 4, and Kfir, 9 months. All had been abducted from their home in the Nir Oz Kibbutz on Oct. 7.
The statement by the military included two revelations:
1) “Following the completion of the identification process by the National Institute of Forensic Medicine in collaboration with the Israel Police, it was determined that the additional body received is not that of Shiri Bibas, and no match was found for any other hostage. This is an anonymous, unidentified body.” (Shiri’s body was returned the following day)
2) “According to the assessment of professional officials, based on the intelligence available to us and forensic findings from the identification process, Ariel and Kfir Bibas were brutally murdered by terrorists in captivity in November 2023.” (It would later be revealed that terrorists in fact murdered the two children with their “bare hands”.)
However, though the Guardian reported on the fact the body handed over was not that of Shiri Bibas, it ignored the part of the statement reporting that the Bibas children were “brutally murdered” by terrorists. Instead, the article repeated the unevidenced claims by Hamas that they were killed by an “Israeli airstrike”.
Here’s the relevant sentence of the original article:
We tweeted the journalist, asking that the article be corrected to note the Israeli evidence contradicting the Hamas claims, and, a few hours later, the piece was updated accordingly.
Here’s the new wording:
Tellingly, Livingstone, the journalist who made the error, who’s listed as Guardian Australia’s Europe front editor, recently published a series of anti-Israel tweets, including two promoting the “genocide” libel, and one retweet of a Hezbollah-linked organisation calling for the arrest of Israeli soldiers abroad:
