The United Nations – whose employees participated in the October 7, 2023, massacre of civilians in Israel – condemned the jihadist terrorist organization Hamas for staging a parade of coffins, including a child and infant, on Thursday prior to handing their bodies over to Israel.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk described the situation as “abhorrent,” according to Reuters, indicating that parading the bodies of dead civilians before a celebratory crowd was a violation of international law.
“Under international law, any handover of the remains of deceased must comply with the prohibition of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, ensuring respect for the dignity of the deceased and their families”, Turk said in a statement.
As part of an ongoing ceasefire deal in Hamas-controlled Gaza, the terrorists have agreed to release 33 hostages, civilians abducted, many from their own homes, during the October 7 massacre. As of last week, the Israeli government reportedly believes that Hamas is still keeping 73 October 7 hostages in captivity and agreed to release hundreds of Palestinians in Israeli prisons – convicted on a variety of criminal charges – in exchange.
The coffins of the four Israeli hostages sit displayed on stage during the handing them over to the Red Cross in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza on February 20, 2025. . (SAEED JARAS/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)
Hamas has made a spectacle out of releasing the hostages, setting up stages adorned with garish anti-Israel propaganda and making the living hostages march out to a crowd of jeering Hamas supporters. In what Hamas has billed as a gesture of generosity to its clearly starved and abused hostages, many have returned to Israel with souvenirs such as jewelry and Palestinian flag keychains.
The hostages released on Thursday were not alive. They were identified as the two youngest known October 7 hostages, siblings Ariel and Kfir Bibas – five years and nine months old at the time of their abduction – their mother Shiri, 33, and 84-year-old Oded Lifshitz. All four were abducted alive from Kibbutz Nir Oz that day, one of the residential communities most acutely devastated by the Hamas siege.
The boys’ father, Yarden Bibas, was abducted on the same day but survived captivity and was released on February 1 as part of the ceasefire agreement.
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Armed Hamas terrorists displayed four coffins on a stage in Khan Younis, Gaza, before a backdrop featuring a bloody image of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu depicted as a vampire, looming over images of the four hostages.
The English-language message on the poster read, “The war criminal Netanyahu & his Nazi army killed them with missiles from Zionist warplane.”
Hamas took no responsibility for abducting the hostages and has offered no evidence to confirm that this is the case. In contrast, significant evidence exists that Hamas tortures its captives and hides them near its terrorist infrastructure, which the Israeli military is likely to target.
The site of the ceremony was surrounded by propaganda posters showing Hamas terrorists as noble resistance fighters; in one poster, a Hamas terrorist appears before rows of coffins draped in the Israeli flag. The site also featured loud music, giving the ceremony a celebratory tone.
Throngs of Palestinians in Khan Younis joined the terrorists as they paraded the coffins carrying the hostages’ bodies to an International Committee of the Red Cross van for departure to Israel. Some images from the site showed the Hamas terrorists engaging with local Palestinian children, in some cases letting them play with their guns and posing for photos.
The United Nations condemning the atrocious images is notable because of its proximity, through the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), to Hamas itself. UNRWA, a specialized agency to help Palestinians in Gaza, has for years indoctrinated Palestinian children with antisemitic terrorist propaganda. Following the October 7 attack, independent organizations obtained evidence of UNRWA employees cheering on the terrorists. The United Nations ultimately admitted that not only had its employees supported the attack, some participated in the atrocities directly.
Hamas terrorists stormed residential sites in Israel, and other civilians targets such as a music festival, that day with the intent to kill, rape, and abduct as many people as possible. The terrorists are believed to have killed an estimated 1,200 people and abduct nearly 200, including the Bibas family. Israeli responders found the bodies of babies in some communities; eyewitnesses described brutal gang rapes and some civilians being executed during these rapes.
Hamas released a statement following the harrowing images of its handover ceremony claiming that it intended to “respect the sanctity of the dead” with the event. They also claimed, contrary to evidence, that “we would have preferred the return of your sons alive, but your leaders chose to kill them and with them 17,881 Palestinian children.” The statement did not explain why, if that was the case, Hamas terrorists chose to abduct children out of their homes on October 7.
Eroding Hamas’s message of “sanctity,” the statement ended with a threat to Israel not to attempt to rescue more hostages: “the exchange is the only way to return the captives alive and trying to retrieve them by force or returning to war will only result in losses.”
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), after participating in the affair, asserted that it rejected the desecration of the victims at the event.
“We must be clear: any degrading treatment during the liberation operations is unacceptable,” an ICRC statement read.
The Israeli government pronounced itself disgusted with the ICRC’s role in the ceremony.
“The Red Cross have not once visited our hostages while they were alive,” government spokesman David Mencer said on Thursday. “The Red Cross, it seems to the government of Israel, made no effort to take medicines to our hostages. In fact, the Red Cross, in participating in these gruesome ceremonies, have expressed themselves in the minds of Israelis as partly complicit in this whole hostage affair, because they have not insisted in visiting our hostages.”
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