This is a story about what should be just an ordinary family in rural Israel, one of many who make their livelihood from agriculture, 300 dunam of clementines and 100 of assorted vegetables.
It was told to me a few weeks ago when were volunteering on this family's farm in moshav Yesha in the southern Otef (Gaza border region).
Three hundred dunams of clementine trees needed pruning and since the war they have almost no one to do the work except for volunteers who come from all over Israel and overseas to help.
Just another Israeli farmer on a small southern moshav struggling to balance bureaucracy, the rising cost of living and a keen love of working the land.
His grandparents, along with the rest of the Egyptian Jewish community, had been forced to leave Egypt in the 1950s following the Nasserist revolution there. Together with other Egyptian Jews they founded this moshav in the north-west Negev, near Israel's border with Egypt. The farmer's grandfather built the village synagogue.
He married a woman from a nearby village who came to join him on his moshav. As the years passed by he took over more of the tasks of running the family farm.
Friday night October 6th 2023, the eve of the Simhat Torah holiday, a young couple and their little red headed boys from kibbutz Nir Oz went to enjoy a festive dinner with the wife's sister on nearby moshav Yesha.
It was a lovely, happy, family gathering that finished on the late side. The moshav hosts suggested that perhaps their guests should stay the night as the little ones were so tired out, but they decided to return home to their kibbutz.
Just a few hours later Israel's Gaza border region was invaded by Hamas and kibbutz Nir Oz was overrun by murderous terrorists.
Heavily armed Hamas gunmen swarmed in to Israel on motorbikes and pick-ups mounted with machine guns.
They rampaged through moshav Yesha. Trying to mount a defence of his home as part of the village civil defence volunteers the young farmer witnessed the wounding and kidnapping of his own farm manager who was grabbed by Hamas terrorists. Outnumbered and outgunned there was nothing he could do to save the man.
Meanwhile up the road the family from kibbutz Nir Oz were kidnapped.
The mother's parents were murdered in their home on the kibbutz.
The image of a terrified mother desperately clutching her two little sons wrapped in a blanket, surrounded by Hamas gunmen became one of the most iconic images of that terrible Saturday.
Three hundred days later the Bibas family, Shiri, Yarden, Kfir, remain hostages in Gaza. No one knows for sure if they are alive or dead.
Kfir has now spent more of his life as a captive in Gaza than free in his home.
Kfir’s first birthday was as a hostage of Hamas.
This week is Ariel’s fifth birthday and he is still a hostage.
Everyone in Israel "knows" the Bibas family as though they were their own flesh and blood.
Their photos smile at us from hostage posters all over the country, a sweet innocent baby and kindergartner with their doting mother and father.
In Israel they are everyone's children and everyone's sibling or cousin.
We yearn for them to come home alive just as if they were our own children, brother or sister.
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