Harvard University police are investigating an incident in which an anti-Israel protester tore down posters with the faces of the Bibas children, who were brutally murdered by their captors after being kidnapped on October 7, 2023, the Harvard Crimson student newspaper reported.
The incident occurred on Monday during a 'Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine' protest, when the protester was filmed tearing down the posters of Ariel and Kfir Bibas that had been posted by the Harvard Chabad. Video of the incident shows another person asking the person tearing down the pictures of the toddler and baby, "What is wrong with you?"
The perpetrator, who was wearing a university employee ID badge, was told to stop, but persisted in ripping off the photographs of the murdered children. He then joined in a chant of “resistance is justified when people are occupied" in support of the Hamas terrorist organization.
Protesters also shouted the genocidal call "from the river to the sea."
Harvard Chabad stated that the video shows "Harvard library employee tears down Harvard Chabad posters of the murdered Bibas family.”
“Although the employed violator seems to be very proud of his actions, new doxxing rules are threatening and preventing students from releasing the unblurred vision of this video," the Chabad added.
Harvard spokesperson Jason A. Newton said that the university police are investigating the incident “as a bias-related incident.”
"The University condemns these acts of vandalism and hate in the strongest terms,” Newton said.
Ariel was just four years old and Kfir just nine months old when they were abducted from their home by terrorists on October 7. Kfir was the youngest of the approximately 250 hostages who were kidnapped that day, and the young ages of the Bibas children made them international symbols of the hostage crisis.
The bodies of the Bibas children and their mother were returned last month, more than a year after they were murdered. The Hamas terrorist organization staged a celebratory ceremony as it returned the children in coffins. In addition, it provided keys to open the coffins that did not work and returned a different body instead of the boys' mother Shiri, whose body was returned for real the following day.
Israeli forensic teams determined that Ariel and Kfir were murdered in November 2023, just a few weeks after their kidnapping. Their captors strangled the boys to death with their bare hands and then abused the bodies in an attempt to make it look like they had been killed in an Israeli airstrike.
Yarden Bibas, the father of Ariel and Kfir and husband of Shiri, was kidnapped seperately from the rest of his family and held apart from them so that he did not know of their welfare. He was also released last month after 16 months in captivity, shortly before the bodies of his wife and children were returned.