Early morning, October 7, 2023, in Kibbutz Nir Oz, just a few miles from the Gaza border, Yarden Bibas, 34, his wife Shiri, 32, and their two red headed little boys, Ariel, 4, and Kfir, just 9 months old, were at home. At 6:30 am, five thousand Hamas terrorists stormed across the border in a coordinated massacre. Nir Oz was hit particularly hard – one in four residents was either killed or kidnapped back to Gaza. The Bibas family ran to their safe room and locked themselves inside. Yarden and Shiri decided that the only way to survive was for Yarden to return fire. He left the safe room to fend off the terrorists, buying time for Shiri and the boys. It did not work. He was swarmed, beaten bloody, and hauled off on a motorcycle by gunmen. Video footage later surfaced showing “civilians” in the mob, some spitting, some beating him, even filming like it was some kind of a spectacle. Then the terrorists got to Shiri. A viral clip shot from a terrorist’s body cam shows her surrounded, terrified, Ariel sucking a pacifier, Kfir hidden against her chest. They were herded out, marched through Nir Oz, then driven into Gaza where they were kept in a terror tunnel.
On January 19, 2025, Hamas and Israel signed on a cease fire. In the first phase, 33 hostages were released, 25 of them alive. Yarden was freed on February 1, alive but alone. The fact that Shiri and the boys were not released with him all but verified that they were not among the living. On February 20, Hamas handed over four bodies, supposedly Ariel, Kfir, Shiri, and Oded Lifshitz, another Nir Oz hostage. Forensic analysis at the Abu Kabir Institute confirmed that Ariel and Kfir had been dead since November 2023. While Hamas had contended that they were killed in an IAF strike, the forensics unequivocally determined that they had been brutally murdered by captors. The body claimed to be Shiri’s body was not. It belonged to an unidentified Palestinian woman. Shiri’s real remains came home on February 21. Whether this “mix-up” was due to malice or ineptitude will never be known. Shiri had suffered the same fate as her children. She, too, had been murdered underground in a Hamas terror tunnel. On February 26, Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir were buried near Nir Oz in the same casket.
Since October 7, the Bibas family has become a national symbol. They became symbols because they embodied Israel’s ethos – no one gets left behind – and its vulnerability. Kfir, the youngest victim, mirrored Israel’s innocence under threat; Shiri and Yarden, its resilience. They weren’t just hostages; they were Israel’s hostages, a unifying rallying cry in a divided country. And the color of that national cry was orange.
The orange connection started with Ariel and Kfir’s red hair, a rare, striking trait in Israel, where less than 2% are natural redheads. That fiery shade, caught in hostage photos and CCTV, stuck in people’s minds. By late 2023, orange balloons marked Kfir’s missed milestones, his first steps, his first birthday. People painted orange ribbons on walls near Nir Oz. It snowballed. Orange became the hostage movement’s color. Tel Aviv’s Habima Theater glowed orange at night; children wore orange bracelets at school rallies. When Yarden was freed and the boys’ bodies were returned, orange flags lined highways. Orange wasn’t planned like a marketing campaign; it grew organically from those redheaded boys and then stuck. Like a national scar – vivid and impossible to ignore.
The week of the funeral, buildings around the world were bathed in orange light in respect and in support. The Empire State Building in NYC, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, The Chain Bridge in Budapest, and the Knesset in Jerusalem all glowed orange. Orange became Israel’s scar tissue, and last week, the world wore it briefly.
I remember another orange rallying cry that was also centered around Gaza. It was the summer of 2005, and the Ariel Sharon government was about to pull off what he called “Separation” and what I called “Forced Evacuation,” uprooting every Jewish settler from Gaza. 21 settlements, nearly 9,000 people would be gone by September 12. Sharon’s unilateral Disengagement Plan was greenlit by the Knesset in February and set to reshape the region. It would certainly take the spotlight away from the growing number of legal issues that Sharon was having. But not everyone was on board – enter the Orange Movement.
The Orange Movement was a grassroots surge. I remember it well – my wife and I were part of it. We believed that leaving Gaza went against everything we believed in – settling the land, long-term security, and a biblical importance to the Land of Israel. It meant trusting terrorists who had done everything they could to betray our trust. The Orange Movement picked orange as their badge, a nod to Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, where the color stood for defiance against a rigged election. Here, it screamed opposition to Sharon’s plan. Cars sprouted orange ribbons on antennas, children wore orange T-shirts, and Jerusalem’s hills bloomed with the hue. In preparation for forced evacuation, the IDF decided to add a blue and white patch of the Israeli flag to soldier’s uniforms, but orange owned the resistance.
Beyond the Ukraine vibe, orange was practical. It was bright, bold, impossible to miss. It unified a messy coalition: settlers from Gush Katif (Gaza’s main settlement bloc), religious nationalists, and Likud members like (Now Prime Minister) Benjamin Netanyahu, who had quit Sharon’s cabinet over the evacuation. The color turned personal protest into a visual megaphone.
The movement kicked into gear as the August 15 deadline loomed. More than 50,000 Israelis marched toward Gaza, aiming to flood Gush Katif and stop the pullout. On July 18, police boxed them in at Kfar Maimon, a town near the Gazan border. For three days, under scorching heat, it was a Woodstock of dissent: orange-clad teens, rabbis – some calling for illegally entering Gaza and others calling for restraint, settlers chanting for their homes. The Yesha Council, the settlers’ leadership, orchestrated it, but the IDF held firm, locking Gaza off. Smaller stunts followed, highway blockades, orange banners at rallies, but the big push fizzled.
August hit hard. Evictions started, and orange became defiance incarnate. In Neve Dekalim, the largest Israeli town in the Gaza Strip, settlers in orange clashed with troops, some locking arms on rooftops, others torching tires. The media captured scenes of children in orange facing soldiers – raw, emotional chaos. By August 23, the last settlers were evacuated, and then their houses were destroyed by IDF D9 bulldozers. Orange lingered as a scar. Protesters wore it at Tel Aviv’s 150,000-strong Rabin Square rally on August 11, one of Israel’s biggest ever. The Orange Movement didn’t stop the disengagement, but it left a mark.
Today, orange from 2005 feels like a ghost tied to a lost fight but reborn with the Bibas tragedy. It is less about victory, more about memory: a color that once tried to hold Gaza now mourns what that evacuation caused. It has become crystal clear that the orange of 2005 led inexorably to the second orange one generation later. In an article in last weekend’s Makor Rishon, a Hebrew newspaper favored by the religious and the politically conservative, Nadav Shargai, a political pundit, discusses the relationship between the two oranges. Over the past few days, the results of an inquiry on the colossal failure of the IDF on October 7 have been published. The results are impossibly horrific. The IDF disregarded good intelligence on continued Hamas exercises near the border, proof positive that they were preparing for an all-out assault. The night before the massacre, thousands of terrorists switched the SIM cards in their phones to Israeli SIMs in preparation for a lengthy stay in Israel. IDF Intelligence took notice but did not consider it important enough to report up the change of command. The aides of the Head of Intelligence and of the Prime Minister were in such a deep slumber that they could not be awakened so they could inform their bosses of impending doom. And when the IDF did respond after the border wall had been breached, they did so in all the wrong places. Instead of bombing terrorists who were still swarming over the border wall, the IAF went out and bombed homes of Hamas leadership. Nevertheless, Shargai asserts that while the IDF shoulders significant blame, the massacre of October 7, 2023, was born in August 2005. When the Sharon Government unilaterally retreated from Gaza, when it lost all Human Intelligence (HUMINT) on the ground, when it put its trust in the Palestinian Authority to run Gaza only to see it overthrown by Hamas two years later, when the Netanyahu government repeatedly tried to keep Hamas quiet with briefcases full of Qatari cash, believing that Hamas was deterred and that all they wanted to do was keep their citizens fed and warm, when government after government and General after General threw billions of dollars in a border wall that was not designed repel a massive invasion, lessons that should have been learned with the Great Wall of China that could not keep out the Mongol hordes, the Maginot Line that could not stop a German assault, and the Bar Lev line that fell like a house of cards in the face of the Egyptian Army.
Orange bred orange. Orange bled orange. But where from here? Shargai ends his op-ed with chilling words: “[Understanding the connection between 2005 and 2023] is critical so that we can investigate ourselves, understand what happened and know what to do to prevent a recurrence. And most importantly, so that we might not make the same colossal mistakes that nearly led to our downfall.” The correlation between the two oranges is more than just ironic – it is nothing less than criminal.
Good things,
Ari Sacher
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