I am shocked and horrified at the news from Israel yesterday. Hamas held its usual propaganda rally before yesterday’s turnover, this time featuring coffins instead of emaciated hostages forced to read statements and accept goodie bags. One of the coffins was marked “Shiri Bibas,” with her photograph and her “date of arrest” (in fact, as anyone who has seen the video knows, Bibas and her two young children were kidnapped on October 7 by armed Palestinians, mostly in civilian clothes). Two others were marked with her children’s names, Ariel and Kfir. The fourth was marked with the name of 83-year-old Oded Lifshitz. The crowd cheered, and the whole awful spectacle was broadcast on Arab TV.

The barbaric spectacle was awful enough, but later yesterday, the Israeli government announced that forensic tests, including DNA tests, showed that one of the bodies, supposedly Shiri Bibas’s, was not hers and was not any of the other hostages’, either.

What words would you choose to describe this? Words like barbaric and uncivilized are accurate but seem inadequate. What makes it worse is that Hamas presumably switched the bodies knowing what would happen: they must have known the Israelis would conduct forensic tests.

Meanwhile, despite the ceasefire, Hamas praised the explosion of several buses in central Israel. While Hamas did not claim credit, the Israeli government’s initial conclusion is that the new attack was carried out by Hamas with help from Iran.

Yesterday was an awful day for Israel and the Jewish people.