Friendly-fire killings of Israeli hostages may force Israel to alter Gaza strategy

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Istanbul: The fatal shooting by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip of three unarmed men who turned out to be Israeli hostages could give momentum to those pushing for a new cease-fire to allow for more hostages to be released.

Critics of how Israel is prosecuting its war in Gaza also seized on the event, in which Israeli soldiers fatally shot three shirtless men who were waving a white flag, as an example of the military’s failure to live up to its promises to protect civilians.

Yotam Haim, Alon Shamriz and Samer Al-Talalka have been identified as the three hostages killed.Credit:

The three men were killed in a neighbourhood of Gaza City where Israeli forces have fought deadly battles with Gaza militants in recent days.

The military said that a preliminary investigation had found that the soldiers were on high alert when the three men emerged from a building dozens of metres away. One soldier, considering them a threat, fired on the men, killing two of them and wounding a third.

The third man fled into a building, from which a cry in Hebrew was then heard, an early investigation found. The man later reemerged from the building and was fatally shot.

The soldiers later realised that the men had posed no threat and were instead Israeli hostages who had either fled or been abandoned by their captors, the military said.

The incident has caused anguish in Israel and added new urgency to arguments over how the country should pursue its goals in Gaza.

The Israeli government has vowed not to stop its operations in Gaza until the military has destroyed Hamas, which led a surprise assault on southern Israel on October 7 that killed an estimated 1200 Israelis and took about 240 others to Gaza as captives, according to Israeli officials.

A weeklong ceasefire between Israel and Hamas last month saw 105 Israeli hostages freed in exchange for the release of 240 Palestinians from Israeli jails before negotiations broke down and the war resumed December 1.

About 120 Israeli soldiers and civilians remain captive in Gaza, and their relatives have been holding protests and lobbying the government to push for another ceasefire so that their loved ones can return home.

Ruby Chen, an Israeli American citizen whose son, Itay, is believed to be held hostage in Gaza, said that he supported freeing Palestinian prisoners charged with murdering Israelis if it meant the release of his son.

The families of hostages were trapped in a game of “Russian roulette”, Chen said in a statement given by a hostage family advocacy group. “We have no time to lose – should we wait for another 10 hostages in coffins?”

Palestinians and critics of how Israel has been fighting in Gaza have called the killings, which likely only became public because the three men were Israeli, a small example of the Israeli military’s disregard for civilians in Gaza.

“Under the laws of war, people are presumed to be civilians,” said Sari Bashi, the program director at Human Rights Watch. “There needs to be strong information to suggest they are not before you can kill them.”

Those rules do not appear to have been followed in this case, she said, given that the men were shirtless and waving a white flag.

“Nobody batted an eye before killing them,” she said, noting that the investigation came only after the soldiers thought the men could be Israelis.

“The Israeli military is right to investigate the apparently unlawful attacks on these three men,” Bashi said. “But it should investigate when Palestinian civilians are the victims too.”

Since Israel responded to the Hamas-led attack with a vast military campaign in Gaza, nearly 20,000 Palestinians have been killed, about 70 per cent of them women and children, health authorities in Gaza say.

The Israeli military said that it went to great lengths to avoid harming Gaza’s civilians and accused Hamas of endangering them by embedding its fighters within the population. It also said the shooting of the three men violated the army’s rules of engagement.

Akram Attaallah, a columnist for Al-Ayyam, a Palestinian newspaper in the West Bank, said that he was not surprised Israeli forces had shot the three men and that Israel would not have had to disclose what happened to them had they been unarmed Palestinians.

“Israel kills even those who surrender and raise the white flag,” said Attaallah, who is from Gaza. “The narrative is a condemnation of the Israeli army.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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