‘How Did This Happen?’ CNN Anchor Presses IDF Spox Over Shooting of Three Israeli Hostages Who Escaped Hamas
CNN anchor Pamela Brown pressed a spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces for an explanation after it was reported that the IDF had mistakenly shot and killed three Israeli hostages who had escaped from their Hamas captors.
The three hostages were identified as “Yotam Haim, who was kidnapped from kibbutz Kfar Aza; Samer Talalka, who was kidnapped from kibbutz Nir Am; [and another] male hostage whose family requested that his name not be published,” according to CNN.
“During combat in Shejaiya (in northern Gaza), the IDF mistakenly identified three Israeli hostages as a threat. As a result, the troops fired toward them and they were killed,” said IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari in a briefing on the incident Friday, adding, “The IDF expresses deep remorse over the tragic incident and sends the families its heartfelt condolences. Our national mission is to locate the missing and return all the hostages home.”
Hagari also noted that the IDF was reviewing the incident. “The IDF emphasizes that this is an active combat zone in which ongoing fighting over the last few days has occurred. Immediate lessons from the event have been learned, which have been passed on to all IDF troops in the field.”
Another IDF spokesman, Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, made similar comments when he appeared on CNN News Central Friday.
Brown introduced Conricus and asked him straight off the bat, “Jonathan, how did this happen? What can you tell us?”
“It’s a very sad and tragic event, one that the IDF, of course, terribly regrets and has told that to the families,” Conricus replied. “We are investigating how it happened.”
According to Conricus, one of the “contributing factors” was that “so far what we have encountered on the battlefield are many Hamas combatants who are dressed in civilian clothes.”
It was still early in the investigation, he continued, but it was “a very sad event, a tragic event, that all goes against everything that we have been trying to do” for the past more than two months of the war.
“But even a sad event like this will not shake our resolve, and it will not divert us from the focus, which is clear: to dismantle Hamas,” said Conricus before his audio broke up briefly.
Brown’s co-anchor Boris Sanchez asked Conricus more about his fellow spokesman Hagari’s statement that “immediate lessons from the event have been learned” and passed on to IDF troops in the field. “Can you share what those lessons were? If there’s going to be a different approach by the IDF now?”
“We are looking into how it happened and how it came about,” Conricus replied, “that these hostages were out and trying to understand how that happened, whether it was intentional, by Hamas, or whether it wasn’t intentional. And what we have told our troops is to exercise extreme caution when being confronted by people in civilian clothes.”
“Again, part of the complexity here is that we are fighting in a civilian environment where almost all of the RPG crews and anti-tank crews attacking our troops and tanks have been dressed in civilian clothes,” he emphasized. “So it creates a very dynamic and challenging combat environment. What we have told our troops is to be extra vigilant and do one more safety check before dealing with kinetics, with any threat that they face on the battlefield, but it’s a very challenging environment that our troops are in.”
Brown followed up to ask about his comment that the hostages were “out,” and asked him about her colleague Jeremy Diamond’s reporting that the rules of engagement had been “loosened” since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. “Do you think that could have played a role in the killings of these three Israeli hostages?” she asked.
Conricus replied that he did not know what Diamond had based his reporting on. “I am not aware of any different rules of engagement,” he said. “Our rules of engagement are those of a military at war against a terrorist organization, that uses civilian infrastructure, uses schools and hospitals, and mosques, and ambulances and everything that you have seen and you have reported on in the last two months. I am not aware that we have changed any of our rules of our engagement. They are according to the laws of conflict and according to standard practice in war.”
“We will have to look into and analyze exactly what happened, and what I can say so far that the three Israelis, the former hostages, they were above ground in the area, in close proximity to one of our units in the area,” Conricus concluded. “Then they were misidentified as posing a threat and therefore Israeli troops fired and unfortunately killed them.”
Watch above via CNN.
