The farce of Israel’s ‘liberal’ investigative journalism
Protesters hold a banner mimicking the one made by the three Israeli hostages killed by Israeli soldiers in Gaza, which read ‘Save Us’ at a demonstration calling for the return of the remaining hostages, outside the Kirya in Tel Aviv, 19 December 2023
Sebastian Ben Daniel (John Brown) writes in +972 on 22 May 2026:
Two weeks ago, the investigative program HaMakor on Israel’s Channel 13 aired a 60-minute report on the December 2023 killing of three Israeli hostages — Yotam Haim, Alon Shamriz, and Samer Al-Talalka — who were shot by Israeli soldiers in Shuja’iya, eastern Gaza City, after emerging from a hiding place carrying a white flag.
Even without intimate knowledge of the details, one thing should have been clear from the outset: When soldiers fire from inside buildings at three shirtless men carrying a white flag, kill two of them, then pursue the third, call him out of hiding, and shoot him dead, the issue is not merely “mistaken identity.” The issue is that Israeli soldiers routinely shoot innocent people. One would have to be extraordinarily naïve to believe that the single time this happened, the victims just happened to be Israelis.
Yet HaMakor fastidiously avoided that conclusion. It did not even entertain the question, declining to report what I and others had already noted in real time: that the battalion commander on the scene, Lt. Col. Dan Luria, had previously overseen another incident at Gaza’s Zikim beach in which Palestinians who had surrendered and posed no threat were killed, and later proudly posed beside their bodies.
Only one of the hostages’ parents — the father of Alon Shamriz — raised the connection between the two incidents on air. But the producers, defying what should be the most basic instinct of investigative journalism, did not pursue it.