IDF says Israeli hostages it killed in Gaza were bare chested and waving white flag

Three Israeli hostages killed by the Israel Defence Forces in Gaza were bare chested and carrying a white flag when they were shot, according to an initial military investigation.

The killing of the three men – who were kidnapped by Hamas on 7 October during its assault on southern Israel – has triggered widespread anger and incredulity in Israel amid a mounting sense of anxiety over the safety of the remaining hostages in Gaza.

According to reports of the IDF probe in the Israeli media, the three men Yotam Haim, Samer El-Talalka and Alon Shamriz – all in their 20s – had somehow escaped their captors and were approaching an IDF position in the Shejaiya area of Gaza City where there has been heavy fighting.

One of the men was carrying a stick with a white cloth tied to it and all had removed their shirts. Spotting the three, an Israeli soldier on a rooftop, however, opened fire on the men, shouting “Terrorists!”.

While two of the hostages fell to the ground immediately, the third fled into a nearby building. When a commander arrived on the scene, the unit was ordered into the building where it killed the third hostage despite his pleas for help in Hebrew.

It emerged too that the IDF had identified a nearby building marked with “SOS” and “Help! Three hostages” two days earlier but had believed it might be a trap.

As the first details of the killing were released by the IDF on Friday night, after most Israelis had begun to mark Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest, a hastily called demonstration converged on the Kirya, Israel’s sprawling military headquarters compound in Tel Aviv.

Chanting “Shame”, “There’s no time” and “Deal now!” – the last a demand for a new ceasefire agreement with Hamas and a hostage exchange – the protesters represent a growing thread of anger in Israel at the way in which the war is being prosecuted, as the situation of the remaining hostages in Gaza has taken a series of dark of turns in the past week.

After the brief optimism of the last ceasefire, which ended at the beginning of the month and saw more than 100 hostages released, news for the hostage families has been grim.

A series of bleak and perfunctory announcements from the Israel Defense Forces and other officials have disclosed the deaths of a number of hostages, including one, Sahar Baruch, killed during a failed rescue attempt.

Friday’s announcement that the IDF had mistakenly killed three hostages, and the astonishing details that emerged on Saturday, however, has been the most shocking.

Underlining the perilous position of the hostages, the killing of the three men had come hard on the heels of the military’s announcement that it recovered the bodies of three other hostages killed by Hamas, after Israel had suggested that it believes around 20 of more than 130 hostages still held in the densely populated coastal strip are dead.

The mistaken killing of the hostages has amplified an already bubbling sense of anger that has cut across Israel’s political affiliations over the Netanyahu government’s handling of the hostage crisis, which critics say has blown hot and cold over the weeks of war prompting recriminations.

“If Israel can’t protect its citizens, why does it exist?” demanded demonstrator Ben Aviv, a camera focus puller, echoing a question that has troubled Israelis since 7 October.

“It is obvious this situation is not going to be resolved by military action.”

“I’m here,” added Jonathan Porat, an economist, “because this is what I would want people to do for me if I was in the hostages’ position. I don’t believe the [military] operation is going the way it’s being suggested. I want the hostages back. I was a soldier. We don’t leave anyone behind.”

And it is not only at gatherings like this where the question of where Israel’s war against Hamas is going – and to what meaningful end – is being asked.

After a week in which Jake Sullivan, US president Joe Biden’s national security adviser, flew in for two days of meetings with senior Israeli and Palestinian political figures, including Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, the same question was being framed in a different way.

Following Biden’s pointed comments last week that Israel was losing international support because of its “indiscriminate bombing”, US officials have told Israel that its window for conducting major combat operations in Gaza is fast closing at the risk of losing even more support.

The reality is that the events of the past few days, around the question of the hostages and on the diplomatic stage, have cast a light on a key unresolved tension at the heart of Israel’s war against Hamas over its two most clearly articulated war aims: how to dismantle the threat of Hamas in Gaza, while securing the release of those captured.

And while Israeli officials have tried to square the circle by suggesting that it was the intense military pressure on Hamas that led to last month’s ceasefire and hostage deal, the hostage deaths in recent days – even as Hamas has said no more would be released while fighting continues – has led to mounting questions over that strategy.

The intersection of these two competing war aims was underlined by comments made a week ago by Israel’s national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi. Asked a hypothetical question: what would Israel do if it located Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, surrounded by hostages, Hanegbi’s answer infuriated hostage families.

“That would be a heart-rending dilemma,” Hanegbi answered.

It was a disquiet only amplified by reports later in the week that Netanyahu had blocked David Barnea, the head of Israel’s foreign intelligence service, Mossad, from travelling to Qatar to kickstart negotiations, expressed bluntly in a statement from the Hostages and Missing Families Forum.

“The feeling is that every evening, a [game of] Russian roulette is being played in which families are being notified of their children’s deaths in captivity.”

For Palestinians in Gaza, the continuing trajectory of Israel’s two-month long offensive is writ large in terms of daily deaths and suffering, amid mounting hunger and disease.

With the death toll – civilian and combatant – now almost 19,000 according to the Hamas-run health ministry in the coastal strip, whole neighbourhoods have been reduced largely to rubble and 1.8 million of the strip’s population of 2.3 million internally displaced.

All of which has fuelled an escalating humanitarian crisis that has been driving the wider international discomfort, not least in Washington, Israel’s closest ally.

Even as senior Israeli officials insisted they need further months to complete their campaign against Hamas, the message from Biden – delivered by Sullivan– was clear.

Discussions, said a US official after the meeting, were focused on “a shift in emphasis from high-tempo clearance operations, high-intensity clearance operations, which are ongoing now, to ultimately lower-intensity focus on high-value targets, intelligence-driven raids, and those sorts of more narrow, surgical military objectives.”

While US officials have said in public they do not wish to impose a timeline for that transition, privately it is clear that the Biden administration is pushing for an end to major combat operations by the end of December, convinced that Israel’s intensive bombing campaign is militarily unnecessary.

Also unsettling the White House has been Netanyahu’s refusal to discuss meaningful ideas for the so called “day after” – who will govern Gaza and how and the scope for reconstruction amid the public rejection by the Israeli prime minister of the idea that a reinvigorated Palestinian Authority, which governs in the West Bank, should be involved.

Despite the bellicose language of Netanyahu and other senior officials insisting the war will go on for as long as Israel deems necessary for “absolute victory”, there is a growing sense that a clock is fast ticking down.

“Even though Netanyahu, [defence minister Yoav] Gallant, and the security establishment are publicly speaking as though they have all the time in the world,” wrote Yossi Melman in the leftwing Israeli daily Ha’aretz, “it’s clear even to them that the time Israel has to continue the war is running out.”

And while Netanyahu has tried to make political capital out of his public show of defiance of Biden, it is not a stance that has met with approval from the Israeli public.

In one sign, however, that Netanyahu may be softening his position, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that the Mossad chief had travelled to Oslo this weekend to meet with Qatari officials about the shape of a new ceasefire for hostages deal, a key demand of the protesters.

On Saturday, however, there was little sign that the war might be heading towards a less intensive phase or a second ceasefire.

Palestinian media reporting that least 14 people were killed in strikes that hit two houses on Old Gaza Street in Jabalia, while dozens more were reported killed in a strike that hit another home in the same area.

“Every day, I leave the place where we took refuge,” Israa Zahr, a doctor working in an Unrwa shelter, who survived an Israeli airstrike on her home that killed her mother, brother and nephew, told the Observer.

“I say goodbye to them when I go to work as if it were the last farewell. I’m afraid I won’t come back. I’m afraid I will come back and I will find no one.”