The three hostages were naked from the waist up, calling for help in Hebrew and displaying a homemade white flag to make it clear that they were surrendering. But even so, the Israeli army considered them a threat and shot them dead on Friday in northern Gaza shouting “terrorists!” in what has become one of the darkest incidents on the Israeli side of the war in the Palestinian enclave. It also arrives at a time of special discontent among the families of the nearly 130 hostages remaining in the Strip, some already dead, due to what they consider to be a lack of commitment from the Government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to bring them back. For this reason, they have demanded that they return “alive and not in bags”, like the last three, after a meeting of the families held this Saturday in Tel Aviv after which they sent a message to the war cabinet chaired by Netanyahu to make an offer. immediate exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners even “with blood on their hands.”
The Israeli prime minister defended the way he is handling the war during a press conference Saturday night. “Military pressure is necessary both for the return of the hostages and to achieve victory over our enemy,” he said in an appearance alongside Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who took responsibility for the deaths of the three hostages.
In the midst of the scandal of the three dead hostages, the Israeli authorities are trying to resume negotiations with more zeal than in the previous days. They do so with internal and external meetings at the highest level, such as the one that the head of Mossad (Israeli foreign spy service), David Barnea, is scheduled to hold in Oslo (Norway), with the Prime Minister of Qatar, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani. Netanyahu did not want to talk about it when asked so as not to give information to Hamas.
“Alon was my friend,” Matan Sobol, 26, sadly explains to EL PAÍS, referring to Alon Shamriz, one of those three hostages. “It has been terrible,” he adds, without wanting to assign blame, but revealing the idea that floats in the air that soldiers in Gaza shoot at everything that moves even at the risk of deaths like those three occurring. Along with Shamriz, the military killed Yotam Haim, both kidnapped on October 7 in the Kfar Aza kibbutz, and Samer Al-Talalka, captured in the neighboring Nir Am kibbutz. The army acknowledged this week that more than 10% of the soldiers who are dying in Gaza do so by friendly fire.
“The Government does not talk to the families,” denounced Rubi Chen, who last week was received along with other relatives in the United States by President Joe Biden. Upon his return, he called the Israeli Executive, and the Government told him that they would not speak to the relatives, according to him. “I thought it was a joke,” added Chen, the father of a kidnapped man, late Saturday night and one of the spokespersons who made statements this Saturday in what is known as Hostages and Missing Persons Square in Tel Aviv to express his discomfort after the meeting of the families and sympathizers of the hostages.
“We ask the War Cabinet to talk to the families and not tell us that they are waiting for an offer from the US or a call from someone else. The Government of Israel must reactivate itself and put offers on the table, including prisoners with blood on their hands, put the best offer on the table to bring the hostages alive, alive,” he stressed. “We don't want them back in bags. That requires you to move now,” Chen added, raising his voice and showing an hourglass. Shortly after, it was announced that on the same Saturday night they would be received by two of the Cabinet members, Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot.
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The incident on Friday began after a soldier observed the three “suspects” from a building leaving a building a few dozen meters away, according to the story reported in the local press from sources close to the investigation. That soldier thought, according to that same story, that they were Hamas members trying to set a trap and immediately opened fire while he shouted “terrorists!” to notify other colleagues in the area. Two died from the shots fired by that uniformed man and a third tried to return to the wounded building while the battalion chief ordered the fire to cease. The wounded man then began to ask for help in Hebrew and went back outside when another soldier shot and killed him. Although the two soldiers breached protocols, the army recalls that in recent days they have suffered several attempted ambushes and attacks by suspected suicide bombers.
Sobol has not only lost his friend Alon in the last few hours. He holds a sign with the image of his cousins Ziv and Gali Berman, both 26 years old, who are still kidnapped in Gaza. “Knowing from the news that we received from the family that they waved the white flag and that they considered them a threat… I do not doubt that the army is doing the hardest work, they try by all means to get them out, but we ask the Government to Help us families bring them back,” he claims during a break in the meeting.
Israel is now accelerating meetings for negotiations on a new ceasefire that will facilitate new releases of hostages. The Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, held a meeting attended by, in addition to the head of Mossad, military and secret service chiefs “focused on efforts to return the hostages,” a Defense statement reported.
“Those who had to save them did not succeed”
Matan Sobol, without referring to the contacts that are being carried out, wants to think that these three deaths will serve to change the way of acting on the ground or to negotiate a new ceasefire, but, at the same time, recognizes that what happened “can happen in any combat or war. Those who had to save them did not succeed, but, I insist, everything can change in just a few seconds.” The war, which continues with intense fighting and bombing throughout Gaza, began with the murder of some 1,200 people by Hamas militiamen on October 7 in Israeli territory, whose military reaction in the Strip has now accumulated more than 19,000 deaths.
These three deaths come at a time when families are increasingly critical of the Government and demand a ceasefire after the attacks resumed with very high intensity, now not only in the north but also in the south of the Strip, after the truce of the last week of November. That cessation of hostilities allowed the exchange of 105 of the hostages for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons.
“We knew this was going to happen, because they have hostages everywhere and if the Hamas people find themselves in danger, they either kill them or abandon them,” says Guy Levi, a 66-year-old sociologist and educator, who accompanies some close friends. from the Nahal Oz kibbutz, one of those attacked by Hamas, under one of the tents set up in the renamed square. “That is why we implore a ceasefire, but the Government prefers to continue fighting because politics is more important to them than getting them out,” he adds. “The hostages are not on the agenda of the Government, which only understands force and military power. The culture of Israel is the military culture,” he laments, looking at the photos printed on his T-shirt of two kidnapped friends.
In the square, converted over the weeks into a large protest and memory installation, citizens take advantage of the weekend to get closer to the hundreds of images that remember those still kidnapped in Gaza, those already released and those who have not been able to return alive. A piano plays accompanied by the voice of a young woman while the stalls offer t-shirts, caps, sweatshirts, badges, bracelets and all kinds of objects with which to keep alive the demand that the authorities bring them back. Hundreds of people wander around and capture photos with their cell phones.
Under the tent, Guy Levi openly criticizes the policy of the Government led by Netanyahu, which, in his opinion, is more concerned with the “settler fascists” than with those “abandoned in Gaza.” He remembers October 7 with rage, and shows the digital calendar agenda on his mobile phone for that day. At six in the afternoon, Kibbutz Nahal Oz celebrated his 70th birthday with a pool party. The event, barely half a kilometer from the border fence that separates that community from Gaza, was communicated and authorized by Israeli military officials, he says indignantly. “I was spared from being there that morning because my mother died in August,” adds Levi, twisting his face, which establishes his way of seeing the conflict in the two missions of one month each that he carried out in Lebanon in 1982. That helped him to move away from a way of acting that you often consider “immoral”. “The army has killed friends of mine in the West Bank,” he remarks.
The accidental death of the three hostages took place in the Shuhaiya neighborhood of Gaza City, very close to the place where this week the army suffered an ambush in which it lost nine of its men. The network of streets in which combat almost always has to be carried out at short distances is a well-known bastion of the Palestinian armed resistance and was already the scene of serious complications for Israeli troops in the 2014 war. “My blood boils.” ”says Guy Levi. And he concludes: “The happiest day will not be when Netanyahu resigns, no. It will be when they bury him.”
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