This is the front of the Bibas home. With

Stevenson's book in Spanish, that he was

reading, El extrano caso del Dr. Jekyll

y Mr. Hyde, since Yarden Bibas's parents

came from Argentina.

At 6:30 a.m. (their home was closer to

the Western limit of the kibbutz) Yarden

sent a text message to his sister Ofri

Levy, about another alert for rockets.

"Here we go again", telling her they

were moving into their shelter. 

When they heard gunshots outside, from

automatic weapons, he texted that it

felt "like the end". At 9:30 a.m. he

said he heard men yelling in Arabic.

His last message was sent at 9:34 a.m.

"they're coming into the house".

Three hours later, around half past noon,

a short video was circulated by Hamas

partisans, showing his wife Shiri and

the two infants being carried away to

Gaza by gunmen.

When you reach the front of Alex's home, first you see his work shoes, with his socks, waiting before the white plastic table, and his black cap on it. Leather sandals too, before the door. And the brooms standing in the corner, waiting for the job to get done.

Gazans flock to the beach, hostage families in Nir Oz fume

"What's actually happening is that we are normalizing the situation. If we once lived in a routine of emergency in the periphery, now we are in a routine of war. Everyone is going back to their lives, doing nothing for three months now, neither militarily nor politically. We mostly hear chatter and are expected to live like this. Everyone is returning to their business and members of Knesset are going on Passover break and flying on vacations, this situation is not normal,"

Yuval Dancyg, Alex Dancyg's son

It's not so much about the poor people in Gaza who spent months under the bombs being at last able to enjoy some respite at the seaside. It's more about the growing feeling of despair at being forsaken, forgotten by people in charge who either just don't know what to do, or don't really care, considering that "hostages" are part of casualties, collateral damage of war.

Watch out, you could be left-wing, a rooted self-righteous liberal, and still think that the Bibas family, Alex, Chaim, Oded, and all the others, are just "lost". Lost if they don't come back alive, and lost if they do. This mindset has a name. Probably what you call inured indifference to others. Autism to a degree. A tacit decision to shut one's ears, and look the other way. In many ways, a growing scourge far worse than terror and its actors, spreading.