The Israel Defense Force's official death toll in the Gaza Strip is now 32 – with a 33rd name released to the public and marked in red on its list of fallen, awaiting confirmation: Sgt. Oron Shaul, who Hamas claims to have kidnapped after attacking his APC in Gaza and killing the other six soldiers on board.
Shaul's status is in limbo. In a carefully worded announcement, the IDF said that the identification process of his remains was still in progress and that the inquiry would continue. The army has not released an official declaration defining Shaul as missing in action, nor whether he is dead or alive. This ambiguous statement reflects the sensitivity of the situation. Without saying so - except in hinted leaks to the media - the IDF estimates that there is no chance that Shaul survived the deadly attack on his APC. The vehicle was seen as a ball of fire, so one could only imagine the condition of those trapped inside. It took the army two days to identify the bodies of Shaul's six comrades and to confirm their deaths. So why the ambiguity on the part of the IDF?
The careful official wording of Shaul's status is rooted in the IDF's practice of categorization, which incorporates military and Jewish traditions, thus taking the problem beyond just a legalistic realm into a question of religious ethics and morality.
The IDF uses three main categories to define such cases. The first one is obvious: that the soldier was killed. This means that a body or body parts have been carefully identified, nowadays using DNA samples (though in the past only dental x-rays were used), and the soldier's remains are buried.
The second category is defined as "a fallen soldier whose burial place is unknown." This means that sufficient evidence has been collected verifying the soldier's death, either from intelligence sources or eyewitnesses confirming that he had died in battle, but that the body itself has not been found and recovered. There is a special plot in the military cemetery on Mount Herzl dedicated to these soldiers, most of them unidentified fallen from the 1948 Independence Day War.
The third category used by the IDF is defining the soldier as "missing in action," which, simply put, means there is no indication of his whereabouts or what happened to him.
In this case, the IDF is still trying to determine what exactly happened to Sgt. Oron Shaul.
Most of the inquiries into the circumstances of Shaul's disappearance are based on intelligence, with the hope – though without high expectations – that Hamas will make an official announcement declaring the soldier alive or dead, and if dead whether they are holding his body, parts of his body, or just the identification tag they displayed when declaring that he had been kidnapped following the attack.
Until the mystery is lifted, the IDF cannot and will not officially define Shaul's status – neither as missing in action or as dead.
There have been several cases in the past in which it was quite clear to the IDF that a soldier or soldiers had died, but the families refused to accept that definition, and battled the army in court to prevent the declaration of their sons as a fallen soldier or as a fallen soldier whose place of burial is unknown.
The most well-known example followed the battle of Sultan Yaakoub during the First Lebanon War in 1982, pertaining to three soldiers most probably killed in that battle, but whose bodies were not found.
Despite eyewitness testimonies describing the soldiers' tank as hit and obliterated, the families – who were religious – refused to allow the IDF to declare them as killed in action.
A more recent case involved the status of Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, the two soldiers whose abduction by the Hezbollah sparked the Second Lebanon War in 2006, and whose bodies were returned to Israel after two years of lengthy negotiations. Hezbollah never revealed whether they had been killed before the kidnap or died in the militants' hands.
As it stands, the IDF has neither the intelligence, pathological or medical evidence proving Shaul's death, and as such cannot - due to tradition and army regulations - define him as killed in action or as fallen soldier whose burial place is unknown. But it also cannot yet define him as missing in action.
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