By Emma Farge
GENEVA (Reuters) – In the last image that Ofri Bibas Levy saw of her brother on social media, he is clutching a bleeding head wound while being restrained in a headlock and dragged away by strangers.
Yarden Bibas, 34, and his wife and two young sons are among around 200 hostages seized by Hamas gunmen on Oct. 7 during their deadly cross-border rampage in southern Israel.
More than a month since they were taken from their home in Nir Oz, Bibas Levy is in Geneva, Switzerland, alongside other families to meet senior officials of the World Health Organization and the International Red Cross to push for their release, or at least for medical access, she told Reuters.
“This is the first thing I want to shout and say that everybody has to condemn it and do whatever they can to bring them back as soon as possible. Because everyday there is it’s dangerous for them,” she said, wearing a T-shirt with a picture of the family with ‘KIDNAPPED’ in red letters.
“And also a cry for the health organisations saying somebody has to go and find out what’s their condition,” she said. “I don’t know if my brother is taking care of his injury. I don’t know if he’s dead or alive,” she said.
The ICRC and WHO did not immediately respond to questions about the two-day visit which Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen and Health Minister Uriel Menachem Buso are also part of.
Bibas Levy said she is worried her brother’s head wound could become infected and is concerned that her nephews, Ariel (4) and Kfir (10 months), may not be getting the food they require.
She also voiced concern that they would be forgotten, as international attention shifts more to the desperate humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip amid Israel’s retaliatory military campaign.
“We can already see that people are starting to forget all the horrendous things that happened on the seventh (of October) and now focusing more on what’s happening right now in Gaza,” she said.
(Reporting by Emma Farge; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
