Israel Has a Nasty Habit of Killing Its Own
October 7 was not the first time that Israelis killed their own people for strategic or propaganda purposes.
Israel’s cold-blooded “Hannibal Directive”
In 1986, three soldiers from Israel’s Givati Brigade were captured by Hezbollah while operating in Southern Lebanon, and area that Israel had been occupying since 1982. Hezbollah eventually killed the prisoners, but finally agreed to return their remains 10 years later in 1996, in exchange for Israel returning the bodies of 123 Hezbollah fighters.
Following the 1986 incident, Israeli army commanders drew up the “Hannibal” doctrine, which decreed that no Israeli soldier was to be taken alive; that all possible measures would be taken to kill the enemy captors, even if it meant killing the captured soldier.
According to Haaretz, the original directive stated that “in case of capture, the main mission becomes rescuing our soldiers from the captors, even at the cost of hitting or wounding our soldiers.” The directive was drafted without seeking legal advice, according to the article.
Indeed, Annyssa Bellal, an international lawyer who specialises in armed conflicts and international law, says the directive was never an official policy and was therefore never published in its entirety.
“From a legal point of view, the directive is very controversial,” Bellal told Al Jazeera.
The directive remained secret for 17 years, until 2003, when an Israeli doctor, Avner Shiftan, learned of the procedure while serving as a reservist in Lebanon, and blew the whistle to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
The reasoning behind the Hannibal Directive
In June 2006, an IDF sergeant named Gilad Shalit was captured by Palestinian militants in a cross-border raid via tunnels near the Israeli border. Hamas held Shalit captive for over five years until his release in 2011 in exchange for over 1000 Palestinian prisoners.
This 1000-to-1 “exchange rate” is not something that Israel can tolerate, according to Eyal Weizman, a British Israeli architect and director of the research agency Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London:
Following Shalit’s return, Israel began to arbitrarily arrest more Palestinians, including minors, in order to expand its assets for any future exchanges…
“All of this reinforces the perception that the life of one of the colonisers is worth a thousand times more than the lives of the colonised,” Weizman wrote.
A 2003 Haaretz investigation of the directive concluded that “from the point of view of the army, a dead soldier is better than a captive soldier who himself suffers and forces the state to release thousands of captives in order to obtain his release.”
Support for Hannibal by the Israeli public
Most articles about the Hannibal Directive claim that it was and is “controversial”, but according to Haaretz this is not the case. Although the legality of the directive is highly questionable, the Israelis themselves seem OK with it.
Indeed, when the existence of the Hannibal Directive was made public, there was no pushback or scandal from the Israeli public:
Despite the controversy and furious media debate that ensued, there was no public backlash against the IDF. It seemed that many Israelis understood there was a necessity for such an order. That putting an Israeli soldier’s life at risk was a reasonable measure to take in order to prevent him falling into the hands of Hamas or Hezbollah.
The broad acceptance of the Hannibal Directive among Israeli public may be one reason that, when the IDF announced it was suspending the doctrine in 2016, people were sceptical, and remain so even today.
The bloody history of the Hannibal Doctrine
It is unclear just how many times the Hannibal Directive has been invoked, but in 2014, during the Israeli Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, it was invoked in a massive way when IDF 2nd Lt. Hadar Goldin was feared captured by Hamas.
The Israeli command believed that Goldin might have been taken alive by Hamas into an attack tunnel beneath Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. They then invoked the Hannibal Directive, which included massive artillery bombardments and air strikes on possible escape routes.
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA):
The go-ahead on the Directive brought four days of intensive, continuous military attacks on the city and severe restrictions on movement that cut it off from the rest of the Gaza Strip. The military assault resulted in the killing of 255 Palestinians, including 85 children, and the injury to hundreds more during these four days alone.
Amnesty International christened that day as “Black Friday” and accused Israel of having committed war crimes.
Goldin was later found to be dead, probably due to the massive bombardment. Hamas still has his body.
Hannibal Directive was invoked on October 7
During the 7 October attack, Hamas and other Palestinians successfully took some 240 Israeli soldiers and civilians from the kibbutzim and military bases back to Gaza as captives. Israeli officials knew that Hamas hoped to exchange them for the thousands of Palestinians, indeed hostage-taking was the prime mission of the attackers.
According to The Cradle:
Hamas used the Toyota pick-up trucks and motorcycles with which they entered Israel, as well as cars stolen from the settlements, to take Israeli captives back to Gaza. Some were also taken to Gaza on foot and even in carts pulled by tractors by other Palestinians who crossed into Israel after the Hamas fighters breached the border fence.
But as an investigation by Haaretz discovered:
According to a police source, an investigation of the incident also revealed that an IDF combat helicopter that arrived at the scene from the Ramat David base fired at the terrorists and apparently also hit some of the revelers who were there.
There is an increasing body of evidence that the IDF implemented the Hannibal Directive against not just their own soldiers, but against Israeli civilians as well.
IDF pilot: October 7 was “a mass Hannibal”
Israeli Air Force (reserve) Col. Nof Erez, in an interview with Haaretz, described Israel’s actions on 7 October as a “mass Hannibal” event.
Erez said the Israeli Apache pilots opened fire on multiple places along the border fence to prevent Hamas from taking the captives back, killing both Hamas fighters and Israelis.
“The Hannibal directive was probably deployed because once you detect a hostage situation, this is Hannibal”, Erez declared.
The NOVA Festival Massacre
The indiscriminate killing of both Hamas and Israeli citizens also happened at a music festival called “Supernova Sukkot Gathering”, a weekend-long outdoor trance music festival which was happening when the Hamas attack occurred. It has been confirmed that Hamas did not know the festival was taking place, but once they discovered it, they used it as aa “target of opportunity” to take hostages.
Unfortunately, many of the would-be hostages were killed before they could be taken back to Gaza. Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth explained:
It is not clear at this time how many of the abductees were killed due to the activation of this command. In the week after the attack, soldiers of elite units checked about 70 vehicles that were left in the area between the Otaf settlements and the Gaza Strip. These are vehicles that did not reach Gaza, because on the way they were shot by a combat helicopter, an anti-tank missile or a tank, and at least in some cases everyone in the vehicle was killed.
Kibbutz Be’eri
Kibbutz Be’eri is a veteran-established kibbutz located in the Gaza periphery since 1946. Its members are generally on the secular left, and it includes many peace activists, according to Wikipedia.
Nonetheless, the kibbutz was attacked by Hamas on October 7. What happened then remains unclear, but evidence has emerged that houses in the kibbutz were shelled by Israeli tanks operating under the Hannibal Directive.
Tuval Escapa, a member of the security team for Kibbutz Be’eri, set up a hotline to coordinate between kibbutz residents and the Israeli army. He told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that as desperation began to set in, “the commanders in the field made difficult decisions — including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.”
In one instance, a group of dozens of terrorists gathered 15 Israeli civilians as hostages inside the home of the kibbutz resident.
When the Hamas fighters launched an RPG from the house, Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram told the tank commander: “The negotiations are over. Break in, even at the cost of civilian casualties.”
An Israeli Merkava tank then fired two shells into the house.
The result was that 13 of the Israeli hostages perished from the shelling. The families of those 13 victims of the Hannibal Directive are now demanding answers and an official probe into the IDF’s actions that day.
Holit Kibbutz
On October 7, Hamas (Al-Qassam Brigades) also attacked Holit, another kibbutz close to the border fence with the Gaza Strip. The IDF dispatched a tank squadron to the kibbutz comprised of a relatively poorly trained and ill-prepared crews.
As reported by The GrayZone:
A glowing profile of an all-female tank company by Israel’s N12 News network contains admissions by the 20-year-old captain — identified only as ‘Karni’ — that she was ordered by a “panicked” soldier to open fire on homes in the Holit kibbutz whether they contained civilians or not.
Hannibal means Israeli hostages are doomed
On October 7, Hamas took a total of 240 Israeli soldiers and civilians hostage and brought them back to Gaza.
Since then, over 100 hostages have been released, and estimates say that around 107 living hostages are still in captivity. The balance of over 30 hostages are now reported killed, Hamas says due to the relentless bombing and shelling that the IDF has been raining down on Gaza.
Israel of course denies bombing areas where hostages are being held, but we know from the previous experience with Lt. Hadar Goldin, and the IDF’s subsequent Hannibal Directive-inspired “Black Friday” destruction, that it is unlikely that Israel is taking any precautions.
In fact, their bombing remains fully “indiscriminate”, as President Biden has stated.
Damning video and eyewitness testimony
A video released by Hamas in January 2024 purportedly showed the bodies of Yossi Sharabi, 53, and Itai Svirsky, 38, whom Hamas claimed were killed by the IDF.
Israeli military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari denied the IDF’s culpability.
“Itai was not shot by our forces. That is a Hamas lie. The building in which they were held was not a target and it was not attacked by our forces,” Hagari told reporters.
But according to Noa Argamani, another hostage who also appeared on the Hamas video, the two were killed by IDF airstrikes, which she herself narrowly survived and from which is still nursing several injuries:
“I was located in a building,” she stated. “It was bombed by an IDF airstrike. F-16 missiles hit all three of us. Two missiles exploded and one did not. In the building we were with Al-Qassam soldiers and three hostages. Myself, Itai Svirsky, and Yossi Sharabi. After the building we were in was hit, we were all buried under the rubble. Al-Qassam soldiers rescued me and Itai, but we were not able to save Yossi. After many days, Itai and I were located to another place. While being transported, Itai was hit by an IDF airstrike and did not survive.”
We know from the Gilad Shalit example that one live Israeli hostage can free up to 1000 Palestinian prisoners, so it is highly unlikely that Hamas would go to the trouble of capturing Israeli hostages, only to later kill them.
Israel kills the Hamas leader who negotiated the hostage release
Unfortunately, it seems that the Hannibal Directive is fully in effect for the remaining Israeli hostages, and Bibi Netanyahu has no intention of negotiating for any further hostage release.
How do we know this?
One telltale sign is that Israel has assassinated the Hamas leader responsible for the hostage release deal that was negotiated last November.
In early January, Israel staged a targeted assassination of Saleh al-Arouri by blowing up his offices in Beirut, Lebanon. Al-Arouri had been a major player in Hamas, and was their number one deal maker when it came to hostages.
An article in the Jerusalem Post entitled “Negotiations for the release of hostages thwarted by al-Arouri’s death” sums up the situation:
Earlier, mediators announced the freezing of the mediation with Hamas, and in Israel they estimate that in the short term, the elimination of the senior official also eliminates the contacts for another deal.
Hostages shot despite waving a white flag
Another sign that Israel is not interested in securing the safe release of their hostages was the incident in December 2023, when three Israeli hostages who had escaped their Hamas captors, were shot in cold blood by IDF forces — despite their being shirtless and carrying a white flag.
One of the murdered hostages was even heard yelling for help in Hebrew prior to being shot.
Apparently, the IDF forces in the area had seen a building two days prior that had the words SOS and “Help! Three hostages” written on it. But the IDF marked the building as a possible trap, according to a preliminary report. Better safe than sorry, I guess.
Hostages killed in tunnels by IDF using poison gas
More scandal is erupting around another three hostages who may have been killed by the IDF.
In December, Israel repatriated the bodies of soldiers Ron Sherman and Nik Beizer, and French-Israeli civilian Elia Toledano, from a Hamas tunnel in Gaza.
The military initially claimed the hostages were killed by Hamas, but later recanted. Now Ron Sherman’s mother Maayan accuses the IDF of poisoning her son.
“We were told that there is a reasonable possibility that he inhaled toxic gases from the IDF bombs,” she wrote on Facebook.
Rear Admiral Hagari, again speaking for the military, was evasive: “At this stage it cannot be denied nor confirmed that they were killed due to strangulation, suffocation, poisoning, or as the result of an IDF attack or Hamas operation”, he said.
Interestingly, the Israeli military did NOT deny that the IDF is deploying poison gas in Gaza.
Hostage mother: Hannibal Directive justifies MURDER
The Middle East Eye reports that Maayan Sherman also asserted on Facebook that her son’s death was caused “not from accidental gunfire, nor from crossfire, but from premeditated murder — bombing with poison gas.”
An article on walla.co.il says that Sherman bases her charges in part on the fact that her son and the other two hostages were in a tunnel where a major Hamas commander, Ahmed Jarandor, was killed by the IDF. In her Facebook post, she referenced an IDF official’s interview on Meet the Press: “He said that if there were abductees around a senior Hamas official, ‘it would be a heartbreaking dilemma’ in terms of deciding whether to sacrifice them,” she wrote.
She believes the IDF knowingly sacrificed her son and the others in order to get the Hamas leader.
The IDF, however, claimed that it was not aware of the hostages’ location. Maayan also disputes this claim, saying army Major General Rasan Alian told her they were aware of her son’s location at any given moment.
She called the army’s latest statement “another lie in the mask of lies”.
The major Israeli news outlet Haaretz is demanding an investigation into the deaths of the three hostages.
Is the US complicit in yet another Israeli war crime?
Prior to Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza, rumours were flying based on supposed “leaks” saying that Israel would deploy nerve gas under the supervision and with the support of US Delta Force.
Use of nerve gas is a war crime under international law and prohibited by the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). Nonetheless, the planned use of nerve gas by the US and Israel was reported in several news outlets:
According to the leaked information, the US military’s Delta Force will watch as “large quantities of nerve gas are pumped into the Hamas tunnels, capable of paralyzing body movement for a period of 6 to 12 hours — time during which the Israelis will infiltrate the tunnels, will release the hostages and kill the Hamas Palestinians.
One thing we know for sure — Delta Force is indeed deployed to Israel:
Al Mayadeen later reported that the IDF had already attempted to penetrate the Gaza Strip four hours after deploying the toxic gas, noting that this strategy was “used in the main areas of operation, specifically in Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun [Gaza].”
It will be interesting to see whether Israel ever does conduct the investigation that Haaretz and Maayan Sherman are calling for.
The Zionist history of murdering Jews
Zionists have a history of killing Jews to reach a political or strategic objective. For example, Zionist radicals have repeatedly launched “false flag” operations that killed Jews, hoping to convince the world — and the Jews themselves — that the Arabs were bloodthirsty Jew-killers.
During the struggle to establish the Jewish State, Zionist terror groups like Irgun and Lehi conducted a bloody campaign of bombings and assassination. Oftentimes the bombs would kill as many Jews as it did British or Arabs, but that was just the price of war. You could say that the Zionists invented the concept of “collateral damage”.
Killing Arab Jews to make a point
When the Jewish State was first established, it badly needed to attract a population. While the flow of Ashkenazi Jews from Europe was a steady stream due to the horrors they had witnessed in WWII, the Israeli leadership wanted to attract Mizrahi, or Arab Jews, from the surrounding Arab countries.
However, for the vast majority of Mizrahi living in the region, life among their Arab Muslim brethren was just fine: they were financially comfortable, living in large, cosmopolitan cities like Cairo, Damascus or Baghdad, where Jews made up fully 25% of the population.
To force the Mizrahi to leave their sophisticated surroundings to move to a backwater like Jerusalem or a farm on a kibbutz, the Israelis knew they had to convince the Mizrahi that their Arab neighbors hated them and wanted them out.
The Israelis thus set about organising a series of “false flag” operations to make the Mizrahi living in the surrounding Arab nations feel they were under attack, thus forcing them to “take refuge” in the new Jewish State.
In Iraq, for example, Yusef Basri, a Zionist intelligence operative in Iraq, was convicted by Iraqi authorities of having carried out bombings targeting Iraqi Jews. His targets had included attacks on a coffee shop, a car dealership and a synagogue, among other attacks on Jewish communities and businesses. The Masuda Shemtov synagogue was also bombed, killing four Jews.
The bombing campaign eventually convinced the Iraqis to suspend the ban on emigration to Israel, and 150,000 Iraqi Jews were airlifted to Israel as part of Operation Ezra and Nehemiah.
Promoting terror — and dead Israelis
Much has been made recently of the fact that Bibi Netanyahu and the Likud government of Israel has, over the years, “propped up” Hamas, even to the point where the Israelis facilitated the financing of Hamas by Qatar. There have even been stories of Israeli officials bringing “suitcases full of cash” into Gaza in support of Hamas.
The reasoning for Israel’s support for Hamas was as cynical as it was clever: to block the formation of a Palestinian State. The strategy was to foment a civil war among the Palestinians by pitting Hamas against the Palestinian Authority, which seeks peaceful coexistence with Israel through the eventual implementation of a “two state solution”.
By contrast, Hamas’s original charter from 1988 called for the destruction of Israel, raising the banner of Jihad (armed struggle) in “the face of the oppressors.”
In other words, TERRORISM.
By maintaining the viability of Hamas, Israel could always claim that there was no way to implement the two-state solution called for by the United Nations and the Oslo Accords, because the Palestinians did not accept the existence of an Israeli state.
The purpose of the doctrine was to perpetuate the rift between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. That would preserve the diplomatic paralysis and forever remove the “danger” of negotiations with the Palestinians over the partition of Israel into two states — on the argument that the Palestinian Authority doesn’t represent all the Palestinians.
Leveraging terror for political motives
The name “Hamas” is actually an acronym in Arabic for Islamic Resistance Movement. As the name suggests, Hamas was created to mount an active resistance campaign against Israel, including through Hamas’s military wing, known as the Al-Qassam Brigades.
Hamas was always determined to use terror to achieve its goals — and so was Israel.
By encouraging, funding, and otherwise aiding Hamas, the Israeli government was thus actively supporting a terror campaign against its own people.
Likud’s cold calculus: dead Israelis = political success
Netanyahu’s Likud Party is a far-right organisation that is a direct descendant of the radical Zionist Irgun and Lehi terrorist organisations. In fact, when Likud leader (and future Prime Minister) Menachem Begin visited the USA in 1948, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and other prominent Jewish Americans wrote a letter to The New York Times condemning Begin’s party as ”closely akin to the Nazi and Fascist parties”.
Despite its radical complexion, however, Likud has ruled Israel almost unchallenged since 1977, having virtually done away with the more secular, moderate Mapai/Labor coalition that dominated Israel’s politics for the first 30 years of its existence.
Like any right wing, fascist and ultranationalist political movement, Likud stays in power by generating FEAR among its constituents. To do this, they relied on Hamas and related violent Palestinian factions to stage terror attacks.
In fact, Israel suffered 5,000 terror attacks in 2022 alone.
How many of those attacks were subsidised with money procured by Netanyahu’s government? We can never know, but certainly that number is not zero.
Yet, in the cold-blooded strategy of Bibi and his Likudniks, that number is worth it to thwart a Palestinian State and — most importantly — to justify an apartheid regime and — lately — a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Israel’s “Final Solution” for Gaza
So we know that a succession of Likud governments led by Bibi Netanyahu were willing to help Hamas murder Israelis in furtherance of what they considered a greater political objective: to prevent the Palestinians from getting a state.
If we bear that fact in mind, we can view the tragic events of October 7 through a new lens and ask ourselves whether that attack by Hamas was something that Netanyahu & Co. not only financed, but desired.
Netanyahu recently gave a speech in defense of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Israel cannot stop the campaign in Gaza, he said. Israel must control the land “from the river to the sea”.
Whenever Israel pulls out of an area, whether it be South Lebanon or Gaza, “we received terrible terror against us”. In other words: terrorism by Hamas justifies the genocide.
Israelis must die in order to facilitate the Final Solution
“Everything changed after 9/11” is an American aphorism that encapsulates not just the internal changes to American society, such as the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security and the draconian measures of the Patriot Act, but also alludes to the “robust” military actions that the US undertook in Western Asia (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc.).
This was all done because over 3000 people perished in a horrible tragedy on 9/11.
Israeli officials LOST NO TIME in comparing October 7 to 9/11. In fact, many Israelis and their supporters went so far as to say that it was “far worse than 9/11”, as Israel lost more people “per capita” than the US did. In fact, many Israelis even compared what Hamas did to the Holocaust.
Did the IDF “stand down”?
Many people, including former US general Michael Flynn, are saying that Netanyahu deliberately ordered the IDF to stand down on 10/7 in order to allow Hamas a free hand to inflict as much damage and killing as possible.
Jewish Pro-Life Foundation leader Cecily Routman, citing government sources, claimed Netanyahu ordered the stand down to allow Hamas to launch its attack in order to justify Israeli retaliation against Gaza meant to ultimately wipe the Palestinian enclave off the map.
An American precedent?
We know that the neocon cabal that formed the “Project for a New American Century”, which included VP Dick Cheney and others in the GW Bush Administration, published their manifesto in 1998 calling for “a new Pearl Harbor” to galvanise public support for a campaign of wars of conquest in the Middle East.
We know that — regardless of what the PNAC wanted — the 9/11 attacks served to provide exactly the type of justification that the PNAC wanted.
We also know that the Netanyahu government, the far-right, racist and ultranationalist coalition that rules Israel, want to fulfil the objectives of their ideological Zionist forbears and cleanse the land of Eretz-Israel of all non-Jews, either by ethnic cleansing or, as Wikipedia explained, through physical “annihilation” — also known as “genocide”.
Once you consider that Netanyahu materially supported a terrorist organisation that killed hundreds of Israelis in recent years, the idea of a “false flag” is not outlandish.
In fact, almost 2000 Israelis were killed by terrorist attacks between 1988 (when Hamas was founded) and 2022.
Would Netanyahu be willing to sacrifice another 1000 or so in order to justify a “Final Solution” for the Palestinian people?
The answer is YES.
#End.
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