Casual Cruelty

The headline hit hard: “Israeli troops mistakenly killed 3 hostages in Gaza.”

Three victims of Hamas’ October 7 attack had managed to escape, only to be shot by their own soldiers. The only thing a decent person could feel was sorrow. This was the reaction of Congressman Jamaal Bowman. “I am heartbroken to hear 3 Israeli hostages have been killed.” Bowman, a strong critic of Israel, knew this was not the time to score political points.

Briahna Joy Gray disagreed.

Gray, a podcaster and National Press Secretary for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign, thought it was essential to rub salt in the wounds and call out the Israel Defense Forces. She continued to do so in her next two tweets.

Early articles confirmed that the hostages were men. Fact-checking would have prevented a pointlessly juvenile tweet.

This last tweet is senseless cruelty.

Podhoretz was making the obvious point that when you fight irregular soldiers, it is hard to tell civilians from combatants, thus making mistakes far more likely. Because Hamas militants often dress in civilian garb, they are easily mistaken for civilians and vice-versa. The Israeli soldiers assumed they were being approached by Hamas fighters in disguise, and so opened fire.

Every army loses soldiers to “friendly fire.” Battles are chaotic and mistakes common.

The rate of friendly fire deaths for all U.S. troops in World War II was 12-14 percent; Vietnam, 10-14 percent; Grenada, 13 percent; and Panama, 6 percent.

Gray knows that the IDF wears uniforms. She has to know that Podhoeritz was referring to Hamas fighters. Yet she needed to stick in one more jab against the IDF.

It’s true that Podhoretz’s point wasn’t the best. The reason Hamas dresses in civilian clothes is if they didn’t, they’d be dead. It’s the nature of asymmetrical warfare. Guerilla fighters dress to blend in. The United States has supported armies who also dressed like civilians—for example, the Mujahideen in Afghanistan fighting against the Soviet Union (1979-1989).

But that doesn’t excuse Gray’s snarky tweet.

I’m pretty sure the IDF were wearing uniforms when they shot the Israeli hostages.

The “I’m pretty sure” gives her game away. It’s middle-school sarcasm. She’s not taking a moral stance; she’s dishing out mean-girl zingers.

Gray thinks Israel is wrong to bomb Gaza in their war against Hamas. That is a legitimate position. She’s complained about the large number of Palestinian casualties. Again, a legitimate point (although she has been too willing to trust Hamas’ claims).

But with these tweets, especially the one about uniforms, her only purpose is to rub salt in the painful fact that IDF soldiers accidentally killed their own citizens, exactly the people they were there to rescue. She doesn’t see the three Israelis as humans with grieving families. They are ways to keep score. She isn’t showing sympathy for the fallen, as Congressman Bowman did. She is gloating because she thinks the deaths have made the IDF look bad. The dead are dehumanized pawns used to rack up “likes” and “retweets.”

Gray has sold her soul for a bit of Twitter clout.

Her casual cruelty is hardly unique in the Hamas-Israel conflict. Wars make dehumanization the norm. About two weeks ago, people were circulating pictures of captured Hamas fighters who had been stripped to their underwear. Some deplored the cruelty and humiliation. Many, however, ridiculed the men, their flabby bellies, their man boobs. In the same breath, they would also claim the humiliation was no big deal. I read tweets that claimed it was as if the men were wearing swimsuits; nothing humiliating about that.

This is another kind of dehumanization. Stripping the men might have been necessary—in a war where terrorists use suicide vests packed with explosives, stripping captives can be a safety measure—but to deny that it’s humiliating is gross. It denies our shared humanity. Strip me to my underwear in front of strangers, and I will feel humiliated. And remember: we don’t even know if all these men were guilty.

Quickly, though, claims that the detainees were Hamas militants were challenged. Palestinians in Gaza identified relatives who they said were not fighters. Some of them were released. The images, rights activists say, began to convey something different, and darker: an attempt to humiliate and dehumanize Palestinians.

Every time we dehumanize others, we chip away at our own humanity.

Briahna Joy Gray forgot that there are humans behind all her point-scoring. The three Israeli hostages were Alon Shamiz (26), Hotam Haim (28), and Samar Talalka (24). They had been held captive in an area with heavy fighting. After an earlier Israeli assault, which killed their Hamas captors, they hid, hoping for rescue. A few days later, when they emerged waving a makeshift white flag, Israeli soldiers fired on them, thinking it was a trick, part of another ambush. IDF soldiers had been ambushed in the same area two days earlier, and nine of them killed. In a confused free-fire zone, fearing death in a place where soldiers had already been killed, the soldiers made the wrong call (one that was against the IDF’s own rules of engagement), and three brave young men were cut down tantalizingly close to freedom.

Alon, Hotam, and Samar were not points in some twisted game of “gotcha,” they were hopes and dreams obscenely shattered.

And then there are the families devastated by the loss. As a father, I try to imagine what that pain must feel like. The thought of losing my own precious son chills my soul. If I lost him, the rage and heartache would break me. Every life lost, whether Israeli or Palestinian, leaves behind a similar chorus of broken parents, of grieving voices.

“I’m going to say this [to] the government. You murdered my son twice,” Avi Shamriz told NBC News’ Hallie Jackson on Monday. “You let Hamas take my son on Oct. 7, and you killed my son on Dec. 14.”

Leila Talalka, mother of Samer Talalka who is a Bedouin Israeli, said the government’s apology was too little too late. “No one helped bring my son back,” she told NBC News.

But the mother of Yotam Haim released an audio recording comforting the soldiers who were responsible for her son’s death. 

“I am Yotam’s mother. I wanted to tell you that I love you very much, and I hug you here from afar,” Iris Yotam said in the recorded message Wednesday. “I know that everything that happened is absolutely not your fault, and nobody’s fault except that of Hamas.” 

Before we send off a tweet reveling in the death of one of those people, or crowing about the other side’s mistakes, we should think of those families, the hearts ripped apart, the empty spaces where humans once walked.