An Israeli mother gives an extraordinary gift of love to the troops
Last week, news broke that, in the fog of battle, Israeli troops accidentally killed three hostages. Now, the mother of one of those hostages, despite her own grief, has recognized that the soldiers involved must be suffering terrible psychological agony, and she has reached out to them with love.
The story was truly dreadful. In the heat of battle, Israeli soldiers mistakenly shot three hostages under Hamas’s control. The Israeli military stated that the three were shirtless and waving a stick with white fabric as they ran to Israeli soldiers. They also explained what may have happened: “The IDF official said that at the time, Israeli ‘forces were under pressure’ with Hamas fighters engaged in ‘a lot of deception.’”
I could instantly imagine the scene. It’s urban warfare on the enemy’s turf. There would have been a fierce fight with Israeli troops under fire from multiple directions. They would have been aware that Hamas fighters use suicide tactics in battle, which would see them getting as close as possible to the troops before detonating themselves.
In real-time, under fire, the Israeli troops might have thought that the men heading their way were potential suicide bombers, or they simply didn’t have the reaction time necessary to hold their fire and spare their lives. This video from a simulated shooting in a non-combat situation gives you just a tiny sense of the fractions of seconds in which you must decide whether someone is friend or foe. The troops were experiencing something closer to this:
It looks like a Call of Duty video game, except that the gunfire is real, and death awaits around every corner. It is a perfect scenario for the fog of war to smother everything.
The latest news says that my sense of what happens during a hot war is correct. An investigation has revealed that the soldiers involved in the fighting were on the receiving end of a string of command failures, as well as making their own mistakes in battle:
An investigation into the incident in which three Israeli hostages in Gaza who escaped Hamas captivity were shot dead by Israeli soldiers uncovers a string of errors and flaws in the operation of and coordination between IDF forces in the Shujaiyeh neighborhood of Gaza City.
The soldier who shot the three hostages – Samer al-Talalka, Yotam Haim and Alon Shamriz – confirmed that he saw them carrying a white cloth, but did not have time to “make sense” of the picture.
Other soldiers opened fire at Haim and killed him, in violation of an explicit order which, they say, they “did not fully understand,” after their commander called on the hostage to emerge from the building he was in.
The reason that the soldiers did not understand the order was that information simply didn’t make it through the system:
The military investigation determined that the soldiers and senior commanders operating in the area were not aware of the possibility that hostages might be held there. They were likewise not informed of a building discovered in the area on which the words: “Help, 3 hostages” and “SOS” were painted.
Maybe people were horribly negligent and deserve to be punished, or maybe there is no such thing as an immaculately conducted war. The number of moving parts is almost incomprehensible, and no fact or action is inconsequential. Bad things happen.
What I cannot imagine—indeed, my brain shies away from imagining—is the psychological pain the troops involved in that shooting are feeling. As has been clear from October 7, Israelis view themselves as a family. Every person who died and every hostage seized was a person stolen from that family. And to introduce into all this emotional agony the knowledge that three of your family members were on the verge of rescue, only for you to have killed them, is a pain beyond comprehension.
But one person did comprehend it. Iris Haim is the mother of 28-year-old Yotam Haim, one of the men who made that unsuccessful break for freedom—and she had a message for the soldiers in the Bislach Brigade, Batallion 17, which, however accidentally, was directly responsible for her son’s death:
Hello to the Bislach Brigade, battalion 17, this is Iris Haim, I’m Yotam’s mother.
I wanted to tell you that I love you very much and I embrace you from afar. I know that everything that happened is completely not your fault, it’s nobody’s fault - except the Hamas, may their name and memory be wiped off the face of the earth.
We invite you to come visit us at the earliest opportunity, whoever is willing, we want to see you with our own eyes and embrace you and tell you that what you have done - as painful as it is to say, and as sad as it is - was likely the right thing to do at that moment, and none of us are judging you or angry with you. Not me, not my husband Raviv, not my daughter Noya, not Yotam, of blessed memory, and not Tuval, Yotam’s brother.
We love you very much, and that’s that.
This magnanimity of spirit is characteristic of Israel because the Jewish faith demands it. But their faith also does not require them to be stupid to the point of suicide, which is why Iris is uncompromising about Hamas: “may their name and memory be wiped off the face of the earth.”
And before any leftist cries “genocide,” note that Mrs. Haim does not say “Muslims,” “Palestinians,” or “Arabs.” Instead, the target of her wrath is a specific political and military group driven by a genocidal ideology. Just as no one would have faulted people during WWII for wishing that the name and memory of the Nazis would be wiped off the face of the earth, she offers the same prayer for the evil that is Hamas. She’s absolutely right, showing a perfect balance of compassion and wisdom.