Israel killed their own citizens. No mistake.

Returning to my previous broadband provider, despite knowing how awful their service is, was a mistake. Drinking two pots of coffee before writing this column; also a mistake.

But the murder of three Israeli hostages at the hands of the IDF? No. I do not believe, by any reasonable metric, that that falls into the category of ‘a mistake’. The cold details of their execution at the hands of Israel’s occupying force preclude it from such.

A rifle did not mistakenly discharge, nor did the hostages mistakenly approach the IDF without signalling their intent. Rather three men, shirtless, waving the internationally recognised symbol of surrender and begging in Hebrew for help, were systematically gunned down by IDF soldiers; their would-be saviours, instead, their murderers.

After killing two of them, soldiers then reportedly killed the third after they re-emerged from hiding, having run from the bullets. All three men were killed by a building marked “SOS”.

To diminish this moment as a simple mistake as many headlines and social posts have tried, is to remove it from the context in which it happened. The soldiers who killed their own citizens did so with clear sight of the men approaching; unarmed, shirtless to show their lack of concealed weapons, and waving a white cloth.

They looked and sounded like civilians - and in turn, the occupying military force indiscriminately opened fire on them, paused briefly after killing two, then opened fire again to kill the remaining survivor.

The only mistake that I can see here is that the IDF - believing that it was killing Palestinian civilians - was actually killing its own.

READ MORE: It’s clear Israel views Palestinian women and children as fair game

Now, there are some who I know will rally in response to this and claim that truly this is the fault of Hamas; that in dressing them as civilians they sought to put the hostages in danger. Of course, to make that argument, you need to first accept the premise that the IDF is targeting civilians.

Why else would it be dangerous to move through the rubble of Gaza while dressed as a peaceful unarmed Palestinian? Had the hostages been shoved into gunfire in the garbs of a Hamas fighter, this would be a different story.

But they were not.

There are in fact many such arguments trotted out that crumble under any real scrutiny; but through a Zionist lens, Palestinians have been dehumanised to such a degree that what should be obvious is obscured to some.

If a hostage situation were to arise in Scotland, and the police’s first response was to kill every civilian alongside the gunman, there would be a reckoning on any politician that justified such a use of murderous force. Even from the darkest recesses of what constitutes Britain’s chattering classes, I doubt you could summon any who would be willing to argue that the police were not at fault because the gunman had used human shields.

Yet even this analogy falls well short of the reality of what is happening in Palestine. No, to more fully represent the real world experiences of Palestinians, the police in this story would also have to identify the dead civilians, then follow through by killing their extended families while they waited for news at home, before following up with the killing of any journalists trying to report on it.

If you can recognise the outcry that such murderous behaviour would illicit were this to happen here, then you must surely understand the horrors of what the Israeli regime have wrought upon Palestine.

READ MORE: Israeli ambassador denies Palestinians have a right to a state

You can ONLY argue that dressing hostages as civilians is a death sentence if, first, you have accepted that the IDF are targeting civilians. That is an extremist position to hold - and in turn, every defender of the state of Israel’s actions should be considered an extremist.

It must be taken, from this point on, that anyone defending Israel’s mission of ethnic cleansing in Palestine does so with an understanding of what is happening to civilians on the ground. Particularly while video after video emerges from Gaza of IDF soldiers having what can only be described as a jolly old time playing in the ruins of mosques and bookshops.

Who knew genocide could be such fun?

And yes, the IDF will come out and claim that these are isolated incidents where the proper rules of engagement were not followed - but I have to ask what top-down culture in a military organisation could have led anyone to thinking that these were acceptable responses in the first place; both in the killing of non-combatants in the streets, and in their revelry in the desecration of places that held meaning to Palestinians. And this is only what we know if.

Every day that passes, it must be becoming clearer to Israel’s defenders that they have endorsed, and in part unleashed, something barbaric on a nation of people whose crime is no more than existing on land that Israel wants for itself. Zionist thinkers and politicians have said as such for decades.

We all have the tools to understand injustice on a bone deep level. For some, that understanding gets lost when it comes to the topic of Israel and Palestine. Perhaps now that Israel has gone full mask off, in its rejections of a two-state solution and its total cruelty, that some who were quick to scream that Israel has a right to defend itself will reflect on what role they have played in this - and in how far they have stretched “the right to self-defence” to mean nothing and to justify everything.