This goes without saying and I’m anyway not the first person to say it: The tragic tale of three Israeli hostages shot and killed by their own would-be liberators in Shejaiya on Friday is a window into the fate of an untold number of Gazan civilians.
The fog of war is famously dense, but if bearing a white flag while shirtless isn’t enough to forestall your own death in a combat zone, it’s fair to assume nothing is. It’s also fair to assess that if the three men weren’t hostages, but rather three Gazan innocents trying to preemptively surrender themselves for questioning (the Israeli army is rounding up military age men in evacuation zones, stripping them and hauling them away) in order to avoid being mistaken for combatants, their deaths would’ve gone unreported.
Israel’s investigation into the incident is ongoing, but there’s nothing else to know. Israeli troops were engaged in the sort of nightmarish urban combat that’s highly conducive to deadly cases of mistaken identity when the three hostages, having either escaped or been abandoned by their captors in the melee, tried to secure their own emancipation. They took off their shirts to show they weren’t wearing explosive vests, tied a white cloth to a stick and walked out in front of harried Israeli troops. Two were killed immediately. The third, wounded, ran back into a building and cried out (in Hebrew) for help. When he tried to present himself for rescue again, he was shot. Again.
An account published by The Times Of Israel said the military had “not identified any Palestinian civilians in Shejaiya in recent days [and] the scenario itself, of hostages walking around in a battle zone, was not taken into account.” The IDF subsequently issued new guidance to soldiers. “There is a possibility that hostages were abandoned or escaped,” it read. “Forces should… pay attention to tell-tale signs, such as speaking in Hebrew [and] raising hands.”
It’s worth asking why the third hostage, already wounded and screaming for help, was shot a second time when he came back outside. The answer, whatever it is, won’t bring him back. “This was against our rules of engagement,” an IDF official told the media, adding that Israeli troops were engaged in “intense combat” in the area and that militants had resorted to donning civilian clothes, including “sneakers and jeans.”
This is Gaza we’re talking about. A militant in Nikes may just be a militant with no boots, but there’s no doubt that IDF soldiers are subjected to “a lot of ambushes” and “a lot of deceptions,” as the same official put it. The IDF claims it discovered a cache of booby-trapped dolls and kids’ backpacks, for example. Unfortunately, that’s part of it.
For two months, the Israeli military insisted that civilian deaths in Gaza (including, implicitly, innocents mistaken for combatants during close-quarters urban combat) were acceptable, if regrettable, collateral damage. It’s a different story when those innocents turn out to be Israelis, though.
The IDF gets no credit for transparency in this particular case. They had no choice but to disclose the incident and, having disclosed it, the details behind it. A coverup that was later exposed would’ve transformed an already tense domestic political situation into total chaos. Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s resisted outside pressure for the military to change its tactics amid escalating civilian casualties, said news of the hostages’ fate “broke the entire country’s heart.” And yet, he was adamant about sticking with the invasion. “It is important for me to stand by our soldiers,” he said. “They are giving their lives to achieve a crushing victory over our enemies and return our hostages.”
I want to remind readers: Netanyahu and some in his government for years sought to preserve Hamas’s stranglehold on Gaza. That’s not speculation and it’s not an opinion. It’s a fact. The Israeli left was delegitimized during The Second Intifada. Hamas came to power in Gaza shortly after the uprising ended. The stage was thus set. As Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, infamously put it in 2015, “The Palestinian Authority is a burden, and Hamas is an asset.” He went on to explain that, “[As] a terrorist organization, no one will recognize it. No one will give it status at the [International Criminal Court]. No one will let it put forth a resolution at the UN Security Council.” The strategy was as clear as it was explicit: Letting Hamas stay in power kept the Palestinian resistance splintered and undermined the Palestinian cause on the international stage, thereby legitimizing any refusals on Israel’s part to engage in renewed negotiations around statehood.
The assumption was that the so-called “violent equilibrium” between Hamas and Israel could (and would) endure in perpetuity. Hamas would be allowed to retain its fiefdom and whenever conditions in Gaza were deemed too oppressive, Hamas would negotiate through rockets, which would invariably be intercepted. Or Gazans might march towards the fence like so many “barbarians” at the proverbial gates. Israel might make some concessions, and the violent equilibrium would be restored. To the extent the Israeli government denies that such a strategy existed, they’re contracting the public remarks of their own officials and, more importantly, they’re lying. On October 7, that strategy was exposed for the dangerous gamble (some might call it a delusion) that it always was.
As of this writing, the death toll in Gaza is nearly 20,000. Around 1% of the enclave’s population. Hamas isn’t defeated. It’s not even clear they’re degraded. They’re still holding 100 hostages, at least. And The White House is apparently done asking. Lloyd Austin will be in Israel this week along with CQ Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The US wants Israel to scale back the bombing (which Joe Biden described this month as “indiscriminate”) and the ground invasion in favor of a more targeted approach to operations involving special forces raids. The White House reportedly wants to see the transition within weeks.
Over the weekend, David Cameron and Annalena Baerbock published a joint article in the The Sunday Times supporting calls for “a sustainable ceasefire.” Such calls, they said, are “understandable” given the scope of the suffering. “We share the view that this conflict cannot drag on and on.” To be sure, it wasn’t a repudiation of Israel by any stretch. But it was a subtle (or not-so-subtle) tone shift from the UK and Germany. Israel, they said, “must abide by international humanitarian law,” and “will not win this war if its operations destroy the prospect of peaceful coexistence with Palestinians.”
The implication: Israel might be losing. International support for the military campaign, or at least the way it’s being conducted currently, is limited to a handful of Israel’s allies, and even that support is waning. The pace and relative scope of civilian casualties has been described by conflict experts as unprecedented in the post-World War II period. Explosives experts have suggested, sometimes in polite terms other times not, that the IDF’s pretensions to respecting civilians are simply untrue given the size of the bombs dropped on overcrowded neighborhoods. Almost no one questions that the majority of the dead are women and children. And now, the IDF, by its own account, shot three half-naked Israeli hostages waving a white flag and yelling for help — in Hebrew.
According to the Israeli military, around 20% of Israeli soldiers killed so far in the operation in Gaza died from friendly fire, “either in airstrikes, shelling, gunfire and accidents,” as The New York Times put it, and “many because of mistaken identification.”
I suggested in October (when it was severely unpopular to make such suggestions) that if the Israeli military went ahead with a ground invasion and persisted in a bombing campaign that already looked suspiciously indiscriminate, victory would prove elusive on any definition of the term. This is what I meant.
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