JTA — As she watched a cascade of seemingly conflicting news reports about the three highest-profile Israeli hostages, Noam Nisim didn’t know what to think.

First, a popular Israeli news program posted on Instagram that the Bibas family had received official word that their relatives — Shiri and her children Kfir and Ariel — had been killed in captivity. The dismal news appeared to confirm a Hamas announcement that the bodies of the mother and two young boys would be returned to Israel on Thursday.

Then the post was deleted.

Around the same time, relatives of the Bibas family issued a statement that they had not, in fact, received confirmation of the three hostages’ fate. The Hamas announcement about Shiri, Kfir and Ariel, they said, had thrown them into “turmoil.”

For Nisim, a pilates instructor at a Jaffa community center, the whirlwind of news just created more uncertainty — coupled with a sinking feeling that the Bibases would not be coming home alive.

“I don’t know how to react yet because I don’t even know what to react to,” she said on Tuesday. “I’m in shock. But on the other hand, it’s not like we didn’t know. We’ve prepared ourselves for this. Still, it doesn’t make it hurt any less.”

Nisim was one of many Israelis left reeling Tuesday after the Hamas announcement, which appears to portend a tragic end for a family that has come to symbolize the intractable pain of the hostage crisis both in Israel and around the world.

A video of Shiri, tearful and desperate, being abducted into Gaza while clutching her sons became an indelible image of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack. The pain was compounded that November, when Hamas released a video showing Shiri’s captive husband, Yarden, sobbing after he was told that his wife and children had been killed in an Israeli airstrike. Israel investigated that claim but has not confirmed it.

Yarden Bibas was taken captive separately and released earlier this month.

Still, Israeli pronouncements about the family have become increasingly dire, with an official expressing “grave concerns” about their fate last month.

Some Israelis are holding out the slimmest........

© The Times of Israel