The three Israeli hostages had been in captivity for 65 days when they received a glimmer of hope. A group of Israeli soldiers arrived at the building in Gaza where they were holed up with their captors.
The soldiers released a combat dog into the building equipped with a GoPro camera. The Hamas militants killed the canine, setting off a firefight with the soldiers. The hostages’ captors died in the gunbattle, but the soldiers moved off, unaware that their compatriots were inside, according to the Israel Defense Forces.
Five days after that missed opportunity, the three hostages were mistakenly killed by Israeli soldiers, an incident that has thrown Israel into a new phase of mourning and sparked public outrage.
The hostages, Alon Shamriz, 26, Yotam Haim, 28, and Samar Talalka, 24, had emerged from a different building bare-chested and holding a makeshift white flag Dec. 15, but they were shot dead by soldiers who thought they were walking into an ambush and hadn’t accounted for the possibility that escaped hostages could be moving around Gaza City, according to a preliminary IDF investigation.
The three had been held captive in the Shejaiya neighborhood, a longtime Hamas stronghold that has seen some of the fiercest fighting in the war. It was the site of a Hamas ambush two days before, in which nine Israeli soldiers, including a battalion commander, were killed, according to the IDF.
“There is a direct link between the sad and very unfortunate mistake in killing those Israeli former hostages and the other ambush incidents,” Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, international spokesperson for the IDF, said in a telephone interview Thursday.
It’s not clear where exactly the hostages went during the five days after their captors were killed, but they did take extraordinary steps to make contact with the Israeli military.
They used food to stain a cloth with the words “help 3 hostages” written in Hebrew, as well as “SOS,” to alert the IDF to their location. An…
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