Three hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza were mistakenly killed by friendly fire, the Israeli military said in a statement Friday.
During combat operations in Shejaiya, a dense neighborhood in the Gaza City area where fighting has been taking place, the Israeli military said troops “mistakenly identified three Israeli hostages as a threat.” Troops fired at the three and they were killed, the Israel Defense Forces said.
On Saturday, the IDF told CBS News that the events occurred during a period of “intense combat,” with Hamas militants moving around in what the official described as civilian attire, including sneakers and jeans. There were “a lot of ambushes” and “a lot of deceptions,” the IDF official said.
The hostages emerged “tens of meters from one of our forces positions,” the IDF official said. The hostages were not wearing shirts and were waving a white flag on a stick, but two were killed immediately, the official said. The third ran away “crying for help in Hebrew.” Though the battalion commander issued a ceasefire order, there was “another burst of fire at” the third hostage, which killed him, the IDF official said.
“This was against our rules of engagement,” the official said, calling the incident “very tragic.”
The IDF have hilariously murdered their own hostages because the IDF are allowed to breach every war rule ever written. They thought the three holding up a white flag were Palestinian, because that’s what the IDs is really, really, really good at doing, murdering unarmed Palestinians.
It’s an ironic karma that Israel killed their own hostages using the thresholds they use to kill unarmed Palestinians.
We have not fully comprehended the damage Israel and America’s war crimes and ethnic cleansing in Gaza will cause…
US Muslims pledge to ditch Biden in 2024 over his stance on Israel-Gaza war
Muslims in key states launch #AbandonBiden campaign over US president’s refusal to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Muslim American leaders in several pivotal states pledged on Saturday to rally their communities against President Joe Biden’s bid for re-election due to his steadfast backing of Israel’s war in Gaza.
The #AbandonBiden campaign began when Minnesota Muslim Americans demanded Biden call for a ceasefire by October 31, and has spread to Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida.
…By voting against the UN demand for an immediate ceasefire…
‘Double standards’: World reacts to US veto on Gaza truce resolution at UN
International rights groups say US ‘risks complicity in war crimes’, has ‘callous disregard for civilian suffering’.
…America is now enabling Israeli war crimes, mass punishment and ethnic cleansing.
To be fair, America has always enabled the brutal occupation of the Palestinian people with their $3billion in military aid each year, but refusing a ceasefire puts the mountain of Palestinian dead on America’s head.
The political backlash to Biden’s acquiescence to Israel means he will lose next years election in the key races he needs to win meaning the horror that is Trump could well get re-elected.
The sheer scale of damage Trump would cause in a. second term would plunge America into a fascist paramilitary state. His plans to militarise ICE and create massive internment camps are all the ingredients he needs to do that.
The brutal and illegal occupation by Israel of Gaza and the West Bank will have a global price we have not yet paid.
The planet inches closer to self destruction.
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Why should Trump be worse than Biden when Biden has so far shown himself to be worse than Trump as President?
David – Well spotted
Sure. Biden has weekly insurrection get togethers where they practice overthrowing the election result should it not go their way! Get that Biden is not good but you have to be kidding me.
Google Project 2025 and come back
Its called the ‘Hannibal directive’ or the Dahiya doctrine to kill their own hostages.
The tragedy occurred in the fog of war, because the forces for good, the IDF, are up against the brutal, amoral jihadist terrorists, Hamas, who deploy every insidious, duplicitous trick in the book. They are losing big time.
Come on gaby, it’s time to actually show some humanity and face up to the fact the IDF are not good. They kill their own, they lie, and they treat their veterans like shit. The IDF kill journalists, kill health care workers, kill children, and kill as collective punishment.
The only losers are the ones who are dying. This is a grubby act of retaliatory violence, has devolved into a war crime.
What duplicitous insidious tricks are those? You can’t get more brutal cruel inhumanity than mass murder from the air By your IDF zionazis heroes. You live in la la land gaby.
Bwahahahahaha!
“Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.” David Ben Gurion, First Prime Minister of Israel
Forces for good, what are you smoking? The IDF is out of control, committing War crimes & genocide against Civilians in contradiction if the Geneva convention which they shit on! They are the most evil, depraved unprofessional & cowardly army there is, made up mostly of thuggish conscripts who are only used to shooting & killing unarmed women & children in Gaza or the Left Bank. Their failure to defend Israel on Oct 7th which totally humiliated them & their inability to defeat Hamas in Gaza today is testimony to their incompetence & ineptitude & unprofessionalism! Hezbollah humiliated them in Lebanon in 2006, sending them scurrying like Rats & now Hamas is doing the same! And you call Hamas amoral Terrorists, but I say to you one Mans Terrorist is another Man’s Freedom fighter & Hamas is responding to 70 yrs of Murder & mayhem that the Zionist Nation has inflicted on Palestinians since 1948, in the only language the Zionists understand, Murder & mayhem?
I can see nothing “hilarious” about this tragic incident. There are lessons to be drawn from it, but unfortunately Gaby completely fails in that respect.
These three Israelis (not the first or the last to die in such circumstances) were killed by the IDF because it is IDF policy to take no prisoners. That means, kill anyone who is trying to surrender. Normally belligerents take prisoners for a number of reasons which might be considered additional to moral concerns around the rules of war. A prisoner kept in safe custody is a prospective source of information and living proof to other enemy combatants that they also can safely surrender. Most importantly, from my own experience, the prisoner of war who is treated with humanity becomes a prospective friend in future times of peace. So if you want to win a war and then win the peace, you take prisoners and you treat them with respect and compassion.
So whatever the outcome of the Battle of Gaza, the State of Israel will lose this war because despite its enormous military capacity it lacks the broader human understanding necessary to win a war, and its Five Eyes de facto allies, including the Realm of New Zealand, labour under the same handicap.
We are seeing here a temporary military success compounded with a profound intellectual and moral failure, and it is this failure, rather than any ephemeral tactical successes, which will determine the final outcome of the war.
The IDF operate as any racist colonial power from Europe has done..and yes after 2000 years, they are Europeans unlike the indigenous Semitic population which remained.
Israehell airforce are committing mass murder genocide from the air. on the ground an IDF bulldozer murdered palestinian persons sleeping on the ground. A few more dead bodies makes no difference. Except for the sickening reek of decaying rotting flesh.
Fantastic work @ Martyn Bradbury. Why aren’t you our fucking Prime Minister? Someone with heart, soul and educated and with commonsense too, the least common of the senses.
Why are we stuck with the current cadre of morons? I don’t want the natzo’s with its box of privateer weasels with their greedy, grasping hands up luxon’s arse hole. I don’t want fucking hideous little seymour or dodgy-as-fuck peters slithering around like nasty little silicon snakes. I want Martyn Bradbury as Prime Minister in equal measure with Chloe Swarbrick and, say, Malcom Evans, someone creative, intelligent and with a fucking sense of humour for a change. Why can’t we have that instead? Why must we always elect dodgy fucking morons or woeful, withering, flouncing Nancies with a nose for weak tea who will go on to make beautiful things ugly and our lucky lives a fucking struggle?
Those others? Those creepy, suit wearing, power-freak, jumped up, greedy, arrogant cunts! They can just fuck off man. To think my tax money pays their disproportionatly massive salaries! It makes me want to go off-grid and grow dope for cash money !
By the way? IRD? How’s all those billions stashed away in hedge funds and shell companies working out for ya then? Quite good probably , as you bash the little guys.
Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Papers
He’s got my vote countryboy, please stop your truth telling & speaking sense, your not allowed to possess more than two braincells in NZ, you must like a Mushroom, kept in the dark like Americans & fed on shit? Please stop because you might upset the Natzi Trolls on this blog
“The IDF have hilariously murdered their own hostages ”
Okay, whatever your opinion on the Palestine question killing people is not hilarious.
hear hear, that one got me too
Depends how bad the blackness is. Clearing the last Palestinians away justifies it. I’d like to see every Nazi killed accidentally by their own lot.
Apologies, they were innocents.
guerilla surgeon, that’s what inept, incompetent & depraved IDF Zionist fuckwits do, they shoot anything that moves, women, children & civilians, the IDF murdered Israeli hostages, shooting the fuck out of them on Oct 7th after mistaking them for Hamas fighters then they blamed Hamas for their balls up & now this utter fuck up, shooting these 3 surrendering Israeli’s, Netanyahu needs to be strung up from a Lamp post for this cock up but the Zionists have what’s called the Hannibal doctrine which means the Official Govt policy of sacrificing your own people because hostages can’t be allowed to be taken & used as bargaining chips, the fucking Israeli Hostages are safer with Hamas than the moronic Israeli IDF & Satanyahu is to blame for this idiocy!
Harden up snowflake…”its a war and killing happens” so says the US media spokesperson.
The collapse of the US empire is nigh. They’ll just take down the western aligned nations with them.
Self genocide? Shooting first and asking questions later is not military security but wholly instinctual i.e. of the beasts, while presuming guilt over innocence goes against all humanitarian and international law. And shooting someone dead because they were deemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time (in the case of Palestinians their own country), wearing the wrong clothes while waving the flag of surrender is a war crime (though this isn’t a war), a crime against humanity and murder.
Woke by name woke by nature, I absolutely agree..
The indiscriminate killing reminds me of a US mass shooting or a Nazi liquidation. If the Israeli government is a true representative of the people then Israelis don’t really care who they kill, even their own innocent citizens. Life, the very essence of humans and humanity, the fragile wonder of nature, is not important to these people. We should be monitoring all Israelis currently in New Zealand for signs of this violent depravity.
Turns out that most of the Israeli rave attendees were shot up by IDF helicopter gunships, I think it might be fair to say, that the IDF have killed more Israelis than Hamas.
It was always clear from long before the Israeli state. Our greatest idealists said it long before and during. Especially the Jews. It’s a foundationless state held together by mistaken American money. Modern Israel just realized the words you speak to the world are hollow. Thin things covering clearing away the people of the land. Exposed by Gaza. Why the misplaced wrong-headed propaganda from them that clunks in our ears.
Depends how bad the blackness is. Clearing the last Palestinians away justifies it. I’d like to see every Nazi killed accidentally by their own lot.
Einstein’s comment is the saddest, in very sad retrospect. Inevitable even then. Even with Herzl c. 1900.
Last gasp of the imperial, colonizing age. Why we moderns can’t take it.
Israeli bulldozers demolish tents, bury Palestinians alive: Report
An Al-Jazeera Gaza correspondent says the bulldozers destroyed tents in which Palestinian families were sheltering outside a besieged Gaza hospital
Israeli bulldozers have killed dozens of Palestinians by running over and crushing the tents in which they were taking shelter outside the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza, Al-Jazeera reported on 16 December.
“Dozens of displaced, sick and wounded people were buried alive. The occupation [Israeli] bulldozers trampled the tents of the displaced people in the hospital yard and brutally crushed them,” Al-Jazeera Arabic correspondent in Gaza Anas al-Sharif reported.
“A terrifying massacre and unspeakable scenes. What the Israeli occupation did inside Kamal Adwan Hospital is a horrific crime against citizens and medical staff,” Sharif said in a post on X.
Some 3,000 Palestinians have been sheltering on the grounds of the hospital, which has been under siege by the Israeli army for eight days.
https://new.thecradle.co/articles/israeli-bulldozers-demolish-tents-bury-palestinians-alive-report
When you are committing genocide, you don’t want any witnesses.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/middle-east/301029081/journalist-who-uncovered-decomposing-babies-in-gaza-is-shot-injured
The IDF are saying that these killings were a mistake.
There was no mistake. Two half dressed men carrying a white flag were shot and killed a third was wounded and sought shelter in a nearby building. The unarmed wounded man was then hunted down and murdered while he begged for his life.
The IDF claim the killers perceived this wounded man and the two others as a threat.
How long are we supposed to swallow this bullshit.
These were deliberate murders of unarmed civilians.
The IDF say they are going to do an investigation. They always say that, they said it with the murder of Al Jazeera Journalist Shireen Akleh. No conviction ever results from these “investigations”.
Even though the murdered men were Israelis a conviction would weaken the general impunity of the IDF to continue committing horrific crimes against Palestinians and get away with it.
In the wake of these murders the IDF say they have issued a directive to their soldiers they are not to shoot unarmed civilians.
This is more fucking bullshit. Only days later an unarmed civilian journalist is shot by an IDF sniper.
Maybe this killer didn’t get the memo. More likely he has orders to eliminate any witnesses to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/middle-east/301029081/journalist-who-uncovered-decomposing-babies-in-gaza-is-shot-injured
On the face of it, these three, like others before them, were murdered by the IDF because they were assumed to be Palestinians, which suggests that the IDF have no certain way of distinguishing between Jewish and Arab civilians. In other words a case of mistaken identity. In many cases physical appearance and use of the Hebrew or Arabic language may not be sufficient to distinguish between Arabs and Jews.
The alternative explanation, put forward here by Pat O’Dea, is that they were recognised as Jews but murdered anyway because they were in a position to testify against the IDF, which if correct would suggest that the IDF is now dissociated from the Jewish population of Israel and has become an organ of violence with no loyalties other than to its own members. I don’t think that is the case, but if there is evidence to show that it is the case then I would expect the war to come to an end sooner rather than later – that is within months rather than years.
The directive from the IDF is understandable, but will create difficulties for its troops. It means that in such situations, whether involving possible settler gunmen on the West Bank or possible hostages in Gaza, they will have to capture the individuals concerned and establish their true identity before killing them if they prove to be Arabs rather than hostages or settlers. That will lead to a final abandonment of moral standards within the IDF, inevitably followed by a collapse of morale.
Woke by name woke by nature, I absolutely agree..