Since 7 October, there has been a steadily growing stream of evidence suggesting that Israel may have been responsible for large numbers of Israeli civilian deaths that day – plausibly even the majority of them given the latest revelations.
This evidence has been studiously ignored by mainstream media in the West.
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electronicintifada.net
Israeli HQ ordered troops to shoot Israeli captives on 7 October
20 January 2024
At midday on 7 October Israel’s supreme military command ordered all units to prevent the capture of Israeli citizens “at any cost” – even by firing on them.
The military “instructed all its fighting units to perform the Hannibal Directive in practice, although it did so without stating that name explicitly,” Israeli journalists revealed last weekend.
The revelations came in a new investigative article by Ronen Bergman and Yoav Zitun, two journalists with extensive sources inside Israel’s military and intelligence establishment.
They also revealed that “some 70 vehicles” driven by Palestinian fighters returning to Gaza were blown up by Israeli helicopter gunships, drones or tanks.
Many of these vehicles contained Israeli captives.
The journalists wrote that “it is not clear at this stage how many of the captives were killed due to the operation of this order” to the air force that they should prevent return to Gaza at all costs.
“At least in some of the cases, everyone in the vehicle was killed,” the journalists explain.
The Hebrew piece has not been translated into English by its publisher, Yedioth Ahronoth, a newspaper which translates many of its articles. You can read The Electronic Intifada’s full English version, translated by Dena Shunra, below.
The secretive “Hannibal” doctrine is named after an ancient Carthaginian general who poisoned himself rather than be captured alive by the Roman Empire.
The order aims at stopping Israelis from being taken captive by resistance fighters who could later use them as leverage in prisoner swap deals.
[…]
1,000 drone targets inside Israel
In November, The Electronic Intifada reported on Israeli air force footage, as well as interviews in an Israeli article with attack helicopter pilots, showing that they had been ordered to “shoot at everything” moving between Israel’s frontier settlements and Gaza.
That Israeli article stated that “in the first four hours … helicopters and fighter craft attacked about 300 targets, most in Israeli territory.”
Bergman and Zitun’s new article says that by the end of the day, drone squadron 161 alone (which flies Elbit’s Hermes 450 drone) “performed no fewer than 110 attacks on some 1,000 targets, most of which were inside Israel.”
As reported by The Electronic Intifada in English for the first time, Israeli news media last month showed footage of tank operators firing at Israeli homes inside the kibbutzes during the battles with the Palestinian resistance on 7 October.
The Electronic Intifada was also the first to reveal in English, back in October, the testimony of Yasmin Porat, one of only two survivors of an Israeli attack on a home in Kibbutz Be’eri which contained around a dozen captives held by Palestinian fighters.
Porat told Israeli media that the Palestinians had treated them “humanely” but that the Israeli army ended a standoff with the fighters by deliberately tank shelling the whole house, even though captives were still present.
She later elaborated that the casualties of the Israeli attack included 12-year-old Israeli captive Liel Hatsroni. Hatstroni’s photo was later used in propaganda by Israeli officials, wrongly claiming she had been burned alive by Hamas – “because she’s Jewish,” former prime minister Naftali Bennett lied.
Last month The Electronic Intifada also reported on an Israeli air force colonel who admitted that 7 October was a “mass Hannibal” event and that their drones had blown up Israeli homes that day.
Bergman and Zitun explain that the original Hannibal Directive was secretly established in 1986 after the capture of two Israeli soldiers in then-occupied southern Lebanon by Lebanese resistance organization Hizballah.
Their new article says that the original Hannibal Directive ordered Israeli forces to “halt the capturing force at any price” and that “in the course of a capture, the main task becomes rescuing our soldiers from the captors, even at the price of hitting or injuring our soldiers.”
Two years after it was exposed by journalists during the 2014 war on Gaza, the doctrine was allegedly revoked, or at least “clarified.” But Bergman and Zitun confirm in their new article that at midday on 7 October, the Israeli military “decided to return to a version of the Hannibal Directive.”
They write that “the instruction was to stop ‘at any cost’ any attempt by Hamas terrorists to return to Gaza, using language very similar to that of the original Hannibal Directive, despite repeated promises by the defense apparatus that the directive had been canceled.”
The new article explains that headquarters ordered all units to carry out the Hannibal Directive soon after the first videos of the Israeli captives emerged.
“Fire at will”
Since 7 October, there has been a steadily growing stream of evidence suggesting that Israel may have been responsible for large numbers of Israeli civilian deaths that day – plausibly even the majority of them given the latest revelations.
This evidence has been studiously ignored by mainstream media in the West.