Monitoring Desk
JERUSALEM: Three Israeli hostages killed mistakenly in Gaza by Israeli forces had been holding up a white flag, according to an initial inquiry into the incident, a military official said on Saturday.
The incident happened in an area of intense combat where Hamas militants operate in civilian attire and use deception tactics, the official said. A soldier saw the hostages emerging tens of meters from Israeli forces in the area of Shejaiya, the official said. “They’re all without shirts and they have a stick with a white cloth on it. The soldier feels threatened and opens fire. He declares that they’re terrorists, they (forces) open fire, two are killed immediately,” said the military official.
The third hostage was wounded and retreated into a nearby building where he called for help in Hebrew, the official said. “Immediately the battalion commander issues a cease-fire order, but again there’s another burst of fire toward the third figure and he also dies,” said the official. “This was against our rules of engagement,” he added. The military on Friday identified the three hostages as Yotam Haim and Alon Shamriz, abducted from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, and Samer Talalka, abducted from nearby Kibbutz Nir Am, all kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7.
Meanwhile, hopes for a peaceful resolution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas are contingent upon a change of leadership at the top of the Knesset, as it seems incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is convinced peace is not an option.
That, at least, is the view of several experts, who believe Netanyahu’s obsession with seeing the decades-old conflict between Israel and the Palestinians as something that can only be managed, not brought to an end, has impeded all other alternatives. “Netanyahu is irrelevant to peace,” Yossi Mekelberg, professor of international relations and associate fellow of the MENA Program at Chatham House in London, told Arab News.
Mekelberg is of the view that Israel should be “looking for a future leadership,” adding that, despite not being in the “actioning peace” phase of the conflict, this would have to “start soon, if we don’t want another prolonged period of low intensity war.” Despite having developed a reputation for survival and rebirth over his 20-plus years at the top of Israeli politics, Netanyahu’s poll numbers indicate his ouster in the near term is now a very real possibility.
Given the corruption charges awaiting him once he is stripped of the legal immunity afforded by high office, the stakes are particularly high. A recent report by The Wall Street Journal found that support among Israelis for Netanyahu to remain in office for the long haul stands at just 18 percent, with 29 percent demanding he leave now and 47 percent seeing no place for him in government after the war ends.
Interviewed by The New Yorker, Dahlia Scheindlin, a political scientist and expert on Israeli public opinion, said that Netanyahu’s popularity had reached its nadir. “By every possible indicator we have, and there have been lots of surveys done since Oct. 7, his popularity is abysmal,” said Scheindlin. “It’s the worst I’ve seen, certainly since 2009. I’d like to say ever, but I would have to check every single survey since the early 90s.”
That decline could have implications for how the war in Gaza is fought, with Netanyahu’s coalition, built in 2022, having lost its majority, dropping from 64 to 32 seats in parliament. And yet, part of that loss of public support stems from the manner in which Netanyahu has sought to manage the conflict with Hamas, with many Israelis blaming his failure of leadership for the attack that set off the latest phase of violence.
Osama Al-Sharif, a Jordanian analyst and political columnist, believes Netanyahu’s political fate is tightly bound up with how the war has been fought. “A more likely scenario over Israeli plans for the demilitarization of Gaza is that Netanyahu himself leaves the scene before Hamas does as the public begin to complain of the victory that may never come,” Al-Sharif told Arab News. — Arab News
