More information has come out about the three Israeli hostages murdered by Israeli troops and the women killed in a Catholic Church in Gaza.
The murder of the two women has generated criticism by the Pope and in Italy, more generally. Reuters reports:
Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani criticised Israeli forces on Monday for allegedly shooting and killing people in a Christian compound in the Gaza Strip, saying such actions would not help in its war to defeat Hamas.
"An (Israeli) sniper shot two women inside a church. This has nothing to do with the fight against Hamas because the terrorists are certainly not hiding in Christian churches," Tajani said, offering rare censure of Israel from Italy.
The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the Catholic authority in the Holy Land, said at the weekend the two women, named as Nahida Khalil Anton and her daughter Samar, were shot dead in the compound of the Holy Family Parish in Gaza.
The Patriarchate statement said seven other people were shot and wounded as they tried to protect others.
Pope Francis on Sunday deplored the reported attack and suggested Israel was using "terrorism" tactics in the Gaza Strip, which is ruled by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas.
An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson said on Sunday the incident was still under review.
Which is bureaucratize for "we don't give a flying f*** and we're not going to do anything about it." For more, see:
- "'Under siege' civilians say they are trapped in Gaza's only Catholic church after 'IDF sniper' guns down two women outside - so how did elderly mother and her daughter become Israel's latest high-profile victims?"--Daily Mail.
- "Pope Sounds Off After Israeli Sniper Kills 2 at Catholic Church in Gaza"--Daily Beast.
Turning to the case of the three Israeli hostages gunned down by IDF forces, it has now been reported that the three Jewish men were not only shirtless and waiving a white flag, but had written "SOS" on the flag and were speaking Hebrew as they approached IDF forces. Moreover:
Israeli media gave a more detailed account. The daily paper Yediot Ahronot reported that according to an investigation, a sniper identified the three hostages as suspects when they emerged from the building, despite them not being armed, and shot two of the three.
Soldiers followed the third when he ran into the building and hid, shouting at him to come out and at least one soldier shot him when he emerged from a staircase, Yediot Ahronot said.
After the bodies had been collected, "[t]he men's bodies were only examined because one of them has a 'Western appearance', the Ynet media outlet reported, which led the IDF troops to realise that they were in fact hostages." Which would have also been readily apparent to the IDF sniper.
The killing of the three hostages has led to recriminations and protests in Israel. But as I suggested the other day, it may be emblematic of greater problems with IDF forces. I'm obviously not the only one: the AP published an article entitled "In Israel's killing of 3 hostages, some see the same excessive force directed at Palestinians." From that article:
Israelis were left stunned and speechless when three hostages held by Hamas were killed by Israeli forces in the middle of an active war zone after they waved a white flag and screamed out in Hebrew to show they did not pose a threat.
For some, the incident was a shocking example of the ugliness of war, where a complex and dangerous battlefield is safe for no one. But for critics, the incident underscores what they say is the excessively violent conduct of Israel's security apparatus against Palestinians. Except in this case, it cut short the lives of three Israelis trying desperately to save themselves.
“It’s heartbreaking but it’s not surprising,” said Roy Yellin, director of public outreach with the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. “We have documented over the years countless incidents of people who clearly surrendered and who were still shot.”
Yellin said the killings violated basic military ethics and international law that prohibit shooting at people trying to surrender, whether combatants or not. But he said it was part of a long trend of largely unpunished excessive force that in recent weeks has ensnared Israelis themselves.
According to a military official, the three hostages, all men in their 20s, emerged from a building close to Israeli soldiers’ positions in the Gaza City neighborhood of Shijaiyah, where troops have been battling Hamas militants in intense combat.
They waved a white flag and were shirtless, possibly trying to signal they posed no threat. Two were killed immediately, and the third ran back into the building screaming for help in Hebrew. The commander issued an order to cease fire, but another burst of gunfire killed the third man, the official said.
The army's chief, Lt. Col. Herzi Halevi, said hostages “did everything possible” to make it clear they did not pose a threat, but that the soldiers acted “during combat and under pressure.”
On Sunday, Halevi reviewed the rules of engagement with troops, saying the prohibition against opening fire on those who surrender must also apply to Palestinians.
“When you see two people who do not threaten you, who don’t have weapons, who have their hands up and are not wearing shirts, take two seconds," he said in comments broadcast on Israeli TV. "And I want to tell you something that is no less important: if these are two Gazans with a white flag who want to surrender, will we shoot them? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. That is not the IDF (Israel Defense Forces).”
Except that it is.
I've written previously about the IDF's "Hannibal directive" which is to kill potential hostages rather than letting them be used as bargaining chips by terrorists, and that this directive was apparently behind IDF troops actually killing many of the Israelis that died on October 7. Jonathan Cook addresses this in greater detail in his piece, "Why Is the Media Ignoring Evidence of Israel’s Own Actions on 7 October?"
An excerpt:
In this telling, Hamas long trained for its breakout, and with a strategic aim in mind. The goal was to launch a commando-style assault on four military bases surrounding Gaza to kill or take hostage as many Israeli soldiers as possible, and a similar assault on local Israeli communities to seize civilian hostages.
The aim, according to this narrative, was to trade the hostages for Palestinian prisoners, thousands of whom are in Israeli jails, including women and children, often held without a military trial or even charges.
To the Palestinian public, these prisoners are no less hostages than the Israelis held in Gaza.
Hamas stormed military bases and the Israeli communities of Be’eri and Kfar Azza. That is why about a third of the 1,200 Israelis killed that day were soldiers, police or armed guards – and why many of the 240 hostages were serving in the Israeli military too.
According to most accounts, even Israeli ones, Hamas accidentally stumbled on to the Nova music festival, which had been relocated to an area close to the fence with Gaza. There were unexpected clashes with security guards, while the attack on festivalgoers turned especially chaotic and gruesome.
So why did Hamas depart from its plan by killing so many civilians? And why did it do so in such a savage, gratuitous and time-consuming fashion that involved burning Israelis alive, using its firepower to blast their homes into ruins, and setting fire to hundreds of cars on the highway near the music festival?
The answer is that it was actually the Israeli troops that killed many of the people.
Surprisingly, the person whose statements have most confounded the official narrative is Mark Regev, the spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In an interview on MSNBC on 16 November, Regev noted that Israel had reduced the official death toll by 200 after its investigations had shown that the charred remains it had counted included not just Israelis but Hamas fighters too. The fighters, burned alive, had been too disfigured to easily identify.
Regev told MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan: “There were actually bodies that were so badly burned we thought they were ours. In the end, apparently, they were Hamas terrorists.”
There was an obvious problem with Regev’s disclosure that went unchallenged by the MSNBC interviewer, and has been ignored by the media since. How did so many Hamas fighters end up burned – and in exactly the same locations as Israelis, meaning their remains could not be identified separately for many weeks?
* * *
Yasmin Porat, who fled the Nova festival and ended up hiding in Be’eri, was one of the few to survive that day. Her partner, Tal Katz, was killed.
She has repeatedly explained to the Israeli media what happened.
According to Porat’s account to Kan radio on 15 November, the Hamas fighters in Be’eri barricaded themselves into a house with a group of a dozen or so Israeli hostages – either planning to use them as human shields or as bargaining chips for an exit.
The Israeli military, however, was in no mood for bargaining. Porat escaped only because one of the Hamas fighters vacated the house early on, using her as a human shield, before giving himself up.
Porat describes Israeli soldiers engaging in a four-hour firefight with the Hamas gunmen, despite the presence of Israeli civilians. But not all of the hostages were killed in the crossfire. Israel ended the clash with an Israeli tank firing two shells into the house.
In Porat’s account, when she asked why this had been done, “they explained to me that it was to break the walls, in order to help purify the house”.
The only other survivor, Hadas Dagan, who was lying face down on the lawn in front of the house during the firefight, reported to Porat what happened after the two shells hit the house. Dagan saw both of their partners lying near her, killed by shrapnel from the explosions.
A 12-year-old girl, Liel Hatsroni, who had been screaming inside the house throughout the firefight, also fell silent.
Hatsroni and her aunt, Ayalan, were both incinerated. It took weeks to identify their bodies.
Notably, Liel Hatsroni’s charred remains have been one of the emotive pieces of evidence cited by Israel for accusing Hamas of killing and burning Israelis.
In reporting the deaths of Liel, her aunt, her twin brother and her grandfather, the Israeli news website Ynet stated that Hamas fighters “murdered them all. Afterwards, they set the house alight”.
Porat’s testimony is far from the only source showing that Israel is likely to have been responsible for a significant proportion of the civilian deaths that day – and for the burned bodies.
The security coordinator at Be’eri, Tuval Escapa, effectively confirmed Porat’s account to the Haaretz newspaper. He said: “Commanders in the field made difficult decisions – including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.”
The burnt-out cars at the Nova festival and their occupants appear to have suffered a similar fate. Worried that Hamas gunmen were fleeing the area with hostages in cars, it seems, helicopter pilots were told to open fire, incinerating the cars and all the occupants.
Read the whole thing as he continues by discussing the Hannibal directive and the death of Israeli citizens at the hands of the IDF.
*sigh* - zero surprise.
ReplyDeleteThere is a ruthlessness in their culture that most people do not seem to appreciate.
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