Israeli hostages killed in Gaza were holding white flag, official says

Jerusalem: Three Israeli hostages killed mistakenly in Gaza by Israeli forces had been holding up a white flag, a military official said on Saturday, citing an initial inquiry into the incident that has shaken the country.

A soldier saw the hostages emerging tens of metres from Israeli forces on Friday in Shejaiya, an area of intense combat in northern Gaza where Hamas militants operate in civilian attire and use deception tactics, the official said.

“They’re all without shirts and they have a stick with a white cloth on it. The soldier feels threatened and opens fire. He declares that they’re terrorists. They (the Israeli forces) open fire. Two (hostages) are killed immediately,” the official told reporters in a phone briefing.

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

The third hostage was wounded and retreated into a nearby building where he called for help in Hebrew, the official said.

“Immediately the battalion commander issues a ceasefire order, but again there’s another burst of fire towards the third figure and he also dies,” the official said. “This was against our rules of engagement,” he added.

The three hostages were identified as three young men who had been abducted from Israeli communities near the Gaza border - Yotam Haim, 28, Samer Al-Talalka, 25, and 26-year-old Alon Shamriz.

It was believed that the three had either fled their captors or been abandoned.

The army expressed “deep sorrow” and was investigating.

Hamas and other militants abducted more than 240 people in their October 7 attack that triggered the war, and the hostages’ plight has dominated public discourse ever since. Their families have led a powerful public campaign calling on the government to do more to bring them home.

Around 300 people turned out to mourn Al-Talalka at his funeral on Saturday in his hometown of Hura, in southern Israel.

“We had so many hopes, expectations, that he would come back to us,” his cousin, Alaa Al-Talalka told Israel’s public broadcaster Kan from his Bedouin community’s mourning tent.

“We’re not going to start pointing fingers, who is guilty and who is not. It is just not the time,” Al-Talalka said. “The families are thinking only of how to bring the hostages back alive. This is the time to ask for the war to end,” he said.

More than 100 hostages remain in Gaza, held incommunicado despite Israeli calls for Red Cross access.

More than 100, women, children, teens and foreigners were released in a deal struck in late November. Others have been declared dead by Israeli authorities.

The news on Friday that three had been killed by Israeli forces prompted a late-night protest outside Israel’s defence headquarters in Tel Aviv, where hostage families were expected to deliver a statement later on Saturday.

One father said each day left families guessing whether they will be next to receive bad news.

”We’re in a kind of Russian roulette,” Ruby Chen, whose son Itay is captive in Gaza, told reporters as he held up an hour glass. “Israel’s government needs to get a grip and bring back the hostages.”

Netanyahu called their deaths an “unbearable tragedy” vowing to continue “with a supreme effort to return all the hostages home safely.”

In southern Gaza, the Al Jazeera television network said an Israeli strike in the city of Khan Younis killed cameraman Samer Abu Daqqa and wounded its chief correspondent in Gaza, Wael Dahdouh. The two were reporting at a school that had been hit by an earlier airstrike when a drone launched a second strike, the network said.

Speaking from a hospital bed, Dahdouh told the network that he managed to walk to an ambulance. But Abu Daqqa lay bleeding in the school and died hours later. An ambulance tried to reach the school to evacuate him but had to turn back because roads were blocked by the rubble of destroyed houses, it said.

Dahdouh, a veteran of covering Israel-Gaza wars whose wife and children were killed by an Israeli strike earlier in the war, was wounded by shrapnel in his right arm.

Before Abu Daqqa’s death, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported at least 63 journalists killed in the war, including 56 Palestinians, four Israelis and three Lebanese.

Israel’s offensive, triggered by the unprecedented October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, has flattened much of northern Gaza and driven 80 per cent of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million from their homes. Displaced people have squeezed into shelters mainly in the south in a spiralling humanitarian crisis.

It has killed more than 18,700 Palestinians, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza. Thousands more are missing and feared dead beneath the rubble. The ministry does not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths. Its latest count did not specify how many were women and minors, but they have consistently made up around two-thirds of the dead in previous tallies.

While battered by the Israeli onslaught, Hamas has continued its attacks. On Friday, it fired rockets from Gaza toward central Israel, setting off sirens in Jerusalem for the first time in weeks but causing no injuries. The group’s resilience called into question whether Israel can defeat it without wiping out the entire territory.

Israelis remain strongly supportive of the war and see it as necessary to prevent a repeat of the Hamas attack, in which militants killed around 1200 people, mostly civilians. A total of 116 soldiers have been killed in the ground offensive, which began October 27.

Smoke rising from Israeli air strikes on the city of Khan Yunis.Credit: Getty

US President Joe Biden’s administration has expressed unease over Israel’s failure to reduce civilian casualties and its plans for the future of Gaza, but the White House continues to offer wholehearted support for Israel with weapons shipments and diplomatic backing.

Israeli airstrikes and tank shelling continued on Friday, including in the city of Khan Younis — the main target of Israel’s ground offensive in the south — and in Rafah, which is part of the shrinking areas of tiny, densely populated Gaza to which Palestinian civilians have been told by Israel to evacuate. Details on many of the strikes could not be confirmed because communications services have been down across Gaza since late Thursday because of fighting.

In meetings with Israeli leaders, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan discussed a timetable for winding down the intense combat phase of the war.

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant told Sullivan that it would take months to destroy Hamas, but he did not say whether his estimate referred to the current phase of heavy airstrikes and ground battles.

A Palestinian reacts after an Israeli strike on residential buildings in Rafah.Credit: AP

“There is no contradiction between saying the fight is going to take months and also saying that different phases will take place at different times over those months, including the transition from the high-intensity operations to more targeted operations,” Sullivan said Friday.

Sullivan also met with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to discuss Gaza’s postwar future. A senior US official said one idea being floated is to bring back Palestinian security forces driven from their jobs in Gaza by Hamas in its 2007 takeover.

Any role for Palestinian security forces in Gaza is bound to elicit strong opposition from Israel, which seeks to maintain an open-ended security presence there. Netanyahu has said he will not allow a postwar foothold for the Abbas-led Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

The US has said it eventually wants to see the West Bank and Gaza under a “revitalised Palestinian Authority ” as a precursor to a Palestinian state - an idea soundly rejected by Netanyahu, who leads a right-wing government that is opposed to Palestinian statehood.

Palestinian officials have said they will consider a postwar role in Gaza only in the context of concrete US-backed steps toward statehood.

In the meeting, Abbas called for an immediate cease-fire and ramped up aid to Gaza, and emphasised that Gaza is an integral part of the Palestinian state, according to a statement from his office. It made no mention of conversations about postwar scenarios.

The 88-year-old Abbas is deeply unpopular, with a poll published Wednesday indicating close to 90 per cent of Palestinians want him to resign. Meanwhile, Palestinian support for Hamas has tripled in the West Bank, with a small uptick in Gaza, according to the poll. Still, a majority of Palestinians do not back Hamas, according to the survey.

AP

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