The coverage of Operation Arnon, in which four hostages held captive in Gaza were rescued, aroused interest throughout the world media; But as is typical when it comes to the coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas, it did not go smoothly.
A news anchor on the British BBC television channel in an interview on Sunday morning asked IDF spokesman Jonathan Conricus, in light of the allegedly large number of civilian casualties, "did Israel warn the Palestinians before the rescue operation."
BBC interview with IDF spokesman Jonathan Conricus about the rescue of 4 Israelei hostages held in Gaza
(Video: BBC)
Conricus was forced to answer the obvious to the strange question: "Of course, we cannot anticipate Israel to be warning ahead of a raid to extract or to save hostages because then what the terrorists would do is to kill the hostages, and that would defeat the purpose."
Conricus added that the hostages "were held and jailed by Palestinian civilians in a Palestinian civilian area. As regrettable as any loss of life is, I think that we would have to investigate really who were the people who jailed these Israeli civilians for eight months."
He added that "there was a significant firefight" between IDF troops and Hamas terrorists.
"There were RPG rockets, heavy machine gun fire, and grenades being thrown. And I think we cannot rule out that at least some of the alleged Palestinian casualties were the result of a reckless Palestinian fire. They may have been the result of Israeli fire, we don't know. But the bottom line ... that again, just like we saw in Rafah about three months ago, Israeli civilians were held hostage by Palestinian civilians," Conricus said.
On the U.S. edition of CNN, the news channel reported that the hostages were "released," including in as chyron, which drew reactions of outrage on social media networks because the wording could imply that Hamas were the ones who freed the Israeli hostages as opposed to the rescue operation that actually took place. Later on the channel corrected it to rescued.