Israel says three hostages carried a white flag before being killed by troops

The Israeli military said Saturday that three hostages accidentally killed by Israeli forces were shirtless, unarmed and carrying a makeshift white flag. The disturbing details of how they died have caused widespread fear and prompted renewed calls for a pause in the fighting so more hostages can be released.

The army, which acknowledged that the killings violated its rules of engagement, announced the deaths on Friday, hours after it said it had recovered the bodies of three other Israeli hostages in Gaza.

Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevy, Israel’s military chief of staff, said Saturday that the three hostages had “done everything so that we would understand” that they were harmless.

“The shooting of the hostages was done in violation of open fire rules,” he said. “It is forbidden to shoot at those who raise a white flag and want to surrender.”

As the death toll of Palestinians killed in the 70 days of war rose to nearly 20,000, according to health officials in Gaza, the shootings of the Israeli hostages underscored the continued risks to the more than 120 people Israel says are still imprisoned, and called they ask about Israel’s situation. prosecution of the war.

Some families of the hostages used the shooting to urge the government to make securing the prisoners’ freedom their top priority.

Itzik Horn, whose children Eitan, 37, and Yair, 45, were kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz, said the killings reinforced his belief that Israel must immediately reach a deal to free all prisoners, even if it means the Palestinians held in Israel are being held must be released. prison sentences on terrorism charges.

“Let them release all the Palestinian prisoners we have here, all the terrorists — what do I care about that,” Mr. Horn said in an interview. “The most important thing is not to defeat Hamas. The only victory here is to bring back all the hostages.”

As Israelis took to the streets to demand the hostages’ return, David Barnea, the head of Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, met with Qatari officials in Europe on Friday to discuss the possibility of a renewed pause in the fighting and further exchanges of Israeli weapons. hostages and Palestinian prisoners. The meeting was scheduled before the hostages’ deaths.

Describing the results of a preliminary investigation, the Israeli army said on Saturday that its soldiers had operated in Shejaiya, an area of ​​Gaza City where heavy fighting was taking place. The soldiers were alert to attempts by Hamas to ambush Israeli troops, possibly in civilian clothes, the army said.

The three hostages emerged without shirts from a building dozens of meters away from the Israeli soldiers, carrying a stick with a white cloth, the army said. One soldier, believing the men posed a threat, opened fire, killing two of them and wounding the third, the early investigation found.

The third hostage fled into the building, from which a cry for help in Hebrew could be heard, the army said. The battalion commander ordered the troops to suppress fire. But the wounded hostage later emerged and was shot dead, the military statement said.

The hostages may have escaped or been abandoned by their captors, said an Israeli military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity as per military protocol.

All three murdered men – identified by the army as Yotam Haim, Alon Shamriz and Samer Talalka – were kidnapped on October 7 from two kibbutzim in southern Israel, near the Gaza border.

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, which represents those kidnapped on October 7 and their relatives, said Mr Talalka, a member of Israel’s Bedouin minority, was working in a chicken farm when he was kidnapped. Mr. Haim was a drummer who was scheduled to perform at a heavy metal music festival in Tel Aviv on the night of the Hamas attacks. Mr. Shamriz was about to pursue a university degree in computer engineering.

As Israelis mourned their deaths, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the killings “an unbearable tragedy” and praised the “brave fighters committed to the sacred mission of returning our hostages, even at the cost of their lives.”

The Israeli military has faced widespread international criticism for what President Biden described last week as indiscriminate bombings. In the ten weeks of war, Israel has hit more than 22,000 targets in the Gaza Strip, a barrage that has killed thousands of civilians. This prompted UN Secretary General António Guterres last month to describe Gaza as a ‘graveyard for children’.

Palestinians and critics of Israel’s fighting in Gaza call Friday’s shootings a small example of the Israeli military’s disregard for civilians in Gaza.

“Under the laws of war, people are supposed to be civilians,” said Sari Bashi, program director at Human Rights Watch. “There has to be strong information indicating that this is not the case before you can kill them.”

In this case, she said, “no one batted their eyes before killing them.” She added that the investigation was only because the men were Israelis.

Akram Attaallah, a columnist for Al-Ayyam, a Palestinian newspaper in the West Bank, said the episode was a “condemnation of the Israeli army” and showed that Israeli forces were waging the war with little regard for civilian life.

“Israel even kills those who surrender and raise the white flag,” said Mr Attaallah, who is from Gaza.

Israel says it wants to limit civilian casualties and blames the high number of deaths in Gaza on Hamas, which places military installations in civilian areas, as well as in schools, mosques and hospitals.

The Israeli military has said that about 20 percent of Israeli soldiers killed in the war were killed by its own forces in airstrikes, shelling, gunfire and accidents, many due to misidentification. On Saturday, 119 Israeli soldiers were killed in Gaza.

Yagil Levy, an expert on civil-military relations at the Open University of Israel, described the 20 percent rate of so-called friendly fire errors as “unprecedented” for the Israeli military.

The war also killed 135 United Nations staff and 64 journalists and news media workers, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a nonprofit group based in New York.

Over the past week, the Israeli military has reported intense urban warfare in Gaza; Nine Israeli soldiers were killed on Tuesday as they tried to rescue wounded troops in Shejaiya, the same neighborhood of Gaza City where the three hostages were killed on Friday.

In addition to the fighting, United Nations officials have described scenes of chaos, famine and utter despair in Gaza among the territory’s 2.2 million residents, most of whom have been forced to flee their homes.

Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency in charge of aid to the Palestinians, traveled to Gaza last week. He described the area as a ‘living hell’.

James Elder, a spokesman for the United Nations Children’s Fund, also visited northern and southern Gaza late last month during a weeklong ceasefire. He wrote this week about chaotic hospitals overrun with injured people and surrounded by piles of rotting garbage.

“In my 20 years at UNICEF, traveling from one humanitarian crisis to another – from famines to floods, from war zones to refugee camps – I have simply never seen such devastation and desperation as in Gaza,” he said.

Global concern also grew Saturday over tensions arising from the war and the disruption of crucial shipping lanes in the Red Sea, where the Houthis, an armed group that controls much of northern Yemen, have carried out drone and missile attacks.

Egyptian state media reported that armed forces had shot down a drone off the coast of Dahab, a seaside resort on the Gulf of Aqaba. The report did not say where the drone came from.

The Houthi militia claimed to have launched a number of attack drones towards the Israeli Red Sea port city of Eilat. Nir Dinar, an Israeli military spokesman, said he could not confirm this claim.

In recent weeks, the United States has been in talks with its allies to establish a naval task force to protect maritime traffic through the region, an initiative that took on more urgency this past week after the Houthis cruised a Norwegian tanker on their way to Italy. rocket ship.

Reporting was contributed by Ronen Bergman, Liam Stack, Mike Ives And Gaya Gupta.