Israeli military says its actions mistakenly killed 3 Israeli hostages

Israeli troops mistakenly shot three hostages to death Friday in a battle-torn Gaza City neighbourhood, and an Israeli strike killed a Palestinian journalist in the south of the besieged territory, underscoring the ferocity of Israel's ongoing onslaught.

The deaths were announced as a U.S. envoy tried to persuade the Israelis to scale back their campaign sooner rather than later.

The hostages were killed in the Gaza City area of Shijaiyah where troops have engaged in fierce battles against Hamas militants in recent days.

The soldiers mistakenly identified the three Israelis as a threat and opened fire on them, said army spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari.

He said it was believed the three had either fled their captors or been abandoned.

"Perhaps in the last few days, or over the past day, we still don't know all the details, they reached this area," Hagari said. He said the army expressed "deep sorrow" and was investigating.

WATCH | Military admits it mistakenly killed 3 hostages:

3 hostages mistakenly killed by Israel military, says spokesman

13 hours ago

Duration 3:04

The Israeli military says three hostages being held by Hamas were shot by Israeli troops during a ground operation in Gaza City after they were mistakenly identified as a threat.

Hamas and other militants abducted some 240 people in the Oct. 7 attack that triggered the war, and the hostages' plight has dominated public discourse ever since. Their families have led a powerful public campaign calling on the government to do more to bring them home.

Demonstrations in solidarity with the hostages and their families take place nearly every day. Late Friday, hundreds of protesters blocked Tel Aviv's main highway in a spontaneous demonstration calling for the the hostages' return.

Israeli political and military leaders often say freeing all the hostages is their top aim in the war alongside destroying Hamas.

Still, in the seven weeks since ground troops pushed into northern Gaza, troops have not rescued any hostages, though they freed one early in the conflict and have found the bodies of several others.

Hamas released over 100 in swaps for Palestinian prisoners last month, and more than 130 are believed to still be in captivity.

The three hostages killed by Israeli troops on Friday were identified as three young men who had been abducted from Israeli communities near the Gaza border: 28-year-old Yotam Haim, 25-year-old Samer Al-Talalka and 26-year-old Alon Shamriz.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called their deaths an "unbearable tragedy," vowing to continue "with a supreme effort to return all the hostages home safely."

The deaths were announced as a U.S. envoy said the U.S. and Israel were discussing a timetable for scaling back intense combat operations in the war against Hamas, even though they agree the overall fight will take months.

10 weeks of war

In southern Gaza, the Al Jazeera television network said an Israeli strike Friday in the city of Khan Younis killed camera operator Samer Abu Daqqa and wounded its chief correspondent in Gaza, Wael Dahdouh. The two were reporting on the grounds of a school in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis when a drone launched a second strike, the network said.

Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations, told a General Assembly meeting on the war that Israel "targets those who could document [their] crimes and inform the world, the journalists."

"We mourn one of those journalists, Samer Abu Daqqa, wounded in an Israeli drone strike and left to bleed to death for six hours while ambulances were prevented from reaching him," Mansour said.

The Israeli army did not immediately respond to an Associated Press request for comment about Abu Daqqa's death.

Israel's offensive has flattened much of northern Gaza and driven 80 per cent of Gaza's population of 2.3 million from their homes. Displaced people have squeezed into shelters, mainly in the south, in a spiralling humanitarian crisis.

It has killed more than 18,700 Palestinians, according to health authorities in the Hamas-run territory. Thousands more are missing and feared dead beneath the rubble.

While battered by the Israeli onslaught, Hamas has continued its attacks. On Friday, it fired rockets from Gaza toward central Israel, setting off sirens in Jerusalem for the first time in weeks but causing no injuries. The group's resilience called into question whether Israel can defeat it without wiping out the entire territory.

Israelis remain strongly supportive of the war and see it as necessary to prevent a repeat of the Hamas attack, in which militants killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians.

A total of 116 soldiers have been killed in the ground offensive, which began Oct. 27.

Meanwhile, Israeli airstrikes and tank shelling continued Friday, including in the city of Khan Younis — the main target of Israel's ground offensive in the south — and in Rafah, which is part of the shrinking areas of tiny, densely populated Gaza that has been identified by Israel as an evacuation zone for Palestinian civilians.

Details on many of the strikes could not be confirmed because communications services have been down across Gaza since late Thursday because of fighting.

In meetings with Israeli leaders on Thursday and Friday, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan discussed a timetable for winding down the intense combat phase of the war.

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant told Sullivan that it would take months to destroy Hamas, but he did not say whether his estimate referred to the current phase of heavy airstrikes and ground battles.