Conor here: Following the unraveling of the mass rape claims, it now looks like the fact that Israel killed many of its own citizens on Oct. 7 is beginning to leak out into the mainstream media.
Of course, many have pointed this out for months and were vilified as antisemitic conspiracy theorists for doing so.
Nine months later, Haaretz confirms what was reported by @intifada (https://t.co/MXsCvqZTJz) and then @TheGrayzoneNews (https://t.co/A9J1uRNvX7) back in October: Israel invoked the Hannibal Directive and killed its own citizens on Oct. 7th.
The handful of independent… https://t.co/3l5P6YOfZ7
— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) July 7, 2024
Some even lost their jobs:
Five months ago, I laid out, in detail, evidence that Israel was intentionally killing its own citizens — aka the Hannibal Directive. In the clip below, I strenuosity advocated for Israeli hostages who reportedly were being killed by Israel. I was later fired after being accused… https://t.co/QPjONXksuO pic.twitter.com/zoVLI6r9a3
— Briahna Joy Gray (@briebriejoy) July 7, 2024
The Washington Post ran a whole hit piece on Electronic Intifada and others like The Grayzone back in January. While it’s a positive to see Haaretz finally report on the Hannibal Directive, it’s about seven months too late. And one wonders how the WaPo hit piece was used to suppress the reach of “conspiracy theories.” As Electronic Intifada pointed out at the time:
The Washington Post’s attack on The Electronic Intifada indicates the frustration Israel and its cheerleaders in the US media feel because they have been unsuccessful in imposing Israel’s version of events.
With First Amendment protections for free speech still strong in the United States, direct censorship of publications is not an option.
So there has emerged a nexus among governments, think tanks funded by governments and arms manufacturers, and big tech companies aiming to control what we can all say online.
The Washington Post article is therefore likely to be used by Israel lobby groups to pressure big tech firms to suppress the reach of journalists who challenge Israel’s lies, under the banner of fighting supposed “disinformation.”
Will the State Department still pretend it knows nothing?
INCREDIBLE: In response to questioning by @samhusseini about Israel’s “Hannibal Directive” — particularly regarding its use on Oct 7 and/or against US citizens — Miller claims that he’s NEVER HEARD OF IT!
Miller: “I am not familiar in any way with either that supposed directive… pic.twitter.com/lndfHR0bkB
— Decensored News (@decensorednews) June 25, 2024
Will WaPo issue an apology? That’s unfortunately probably about as likely as news of the Hannibal Directive in Haaretz having any effect on Israel’s ongoing destruction of Gaza. As of the time of this post Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu continues to insist that any Gaza ceasefire deal must allow Israel to resume fighting until its “objectives” are met.
By Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretzreported Sunday that Israel’s military repeatedly employed a protocol known as the “Hannibal Directive” during the October 7 Hamas-led attack in an attempt to prevent the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers—even if it meant putting the lives of army captives and civilians at risk.
Haaretz found based on documents and interviews with soldiers and senior Israeli officers that Hannibal—an operational order developed in 1986 that “directs the use of force to prevent soldiers being taken into captivity” by enemy militants—was used “at three army facilities infiltrated by Hamas, potentially endangering civilians as well.”
During the first hours of the Hamas-led attack, according to Haaretz, Israeli soldiers were given an order: “Not a single vehicle can return to Gaza.”
“At this point, the IDF was not aware of the extent of kidnapping along the Gaza border, but it did know that many people were involved,” the newspaper continued. “Thus, it was entirely clear what that message meant, and what the fate of some of the kidnapped people would be.”
The full text of the Hannibal Directive has never been published. But according to a Haaretz story about the directive from more than two decades ago, part of it states that “during an abduction, the major mission is to rescue our soldiers from the abductors even at the price of harming or wounding our soldiers.”
“Light-arms fire is to be used in order to bring the abductors to the ground or to stop them,” it adds. “If the vehicle or the abductors do not stop, single-shot (sniper) fire should be aimed at them, deliberately, in order to hit the abductors, even if this means hitting our soldiers. In any event, everything will be done to stop the vehicle and not allow it to escape.”
Israeli authorities have acknowledged “multiple incidents of our forces firing on our forces” on October 7. In April, Israel’s military said that one of the hostages taken by Hamas militants during the October attack was likely killed by Israeli helicopter fire.
But the IDF, which has killed more than 38,000 people in Gaza since October 7, has declined to say whether Hannibal was used during the Hamas-led attack.
Haaretz stressed Sunday that it “does not know whether or how many civilians and soldiers were hit due to these procedures, but the cumulative data indicates that many of the kidnapped people were at risk, exposed to Israeli gunfire, even if they were not the target.”
The first of the known uses of the Hannibal Directive on October 7 came “when an observation post at the Yiftah outpost reported that someone had been kidnapped at the Erez border crossing, adjacent to the IDF’s liaison office,” Haaretz reported.
“‘Hannibal at Erez’ came the command from divisional headquarters, ‘dispatch a Zik.’ The Zik is an unmanned assault drone, and the meaning of this command was clear,” the newspaper found.
The directive was employed at least two additional times during the attack, according to Haaretz, which cited one unnamed source in Israel’s Southern Command as saying that the country’s forces were instructed to “turn the area around the border fence into a killing zone, closing it off toward the west.”
The newspaper continued:
One case in which it is known that civilians were hit, a case that received wide coverage, took place in the house of Pessi Cohen at Kibbutz Be’eri. Fourteen hostages were held in the house as the IDF attacked it, with 13 of them killed. In the coming weeks, the IDF is expected to publish the results of its investigation of the incident, which will answer the question of whether Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram, the commander of Division 99 who was in charge of operations in Be’eri on October 7, was employing the Hannibal procedure. Did he order the tank to move ahead even at the cost of civilian casualties, as he stated in an interview he gave later to The New York Times?
Haaretz’s reporting comes weeks after a United Nations investigation concluded that the IDF “had likely applied the Hannibal Directive” on October 7, killing more than a dozen Israeli civilians.
No mention of the fact that Gadi Eizenkot is supposed to have revoked it back in 2016…..
Larry Johnson — “It appears that more than 500 (vehicles) were hit with air launched rockets and destroyed. If there was only one Israeli in each of those vehicles (odds are there were more), there were at least 500 Israeli casualties from that alone. We know the names of the Israeli dead. How many were in those cars?”
We will never know. Those cars are being shredded and will be buried so that there will be no possibility of any forensic study of them, all blessed by the rabbis. Still, the IDF will admit to losing about 300 killed in Gaza – which I do not believe for a minute – which if true, has yet to equal the number of Israelis killed by the IDF on that first day. The Hannibal doctrine was all about killing captured soldiers and here you were talking about a tiny number. Somehow, it got expanded to include civilians who could be killed by the IDF by the hundreds rather than see them captured. So at this point, the IDF has killed more of their fellow Israelis than Hamas has killed. They must be proud.
You can see some of those cars in this clip:
Israeli rave survivors return to look for cars after Oct. 7 Hamas attack
From the retweeted tweet by Ronel “…but it can be assumed to be in the many 10s, if not 100s killed this way…”
No, it can’t be assumed. There isn’t anything indicating the number was in the 100s. Maybe it is, but there is nothing here supporting this assumed jump in magnatude.
as long as everyone is guessing, there is nothing wrong with postulating that the number killed is over a hundred. Considering that since the coverage of the use of the hannibal directive ,which started right after oct 7, frequently, time the mainstream media pointed to a picture , it looked like tank shells, hell fire missiles, other heavy artillery, etc were responsible for A LOT of death.
So, now someone admits the hannibal directive was used, and you think it is odd to guess that there may be hundreds of isrealis that were killed by isreali’s?
That is odd.
and considering that the isrealis have lied about EVERYTHING so far, why anyone would assume they are being honest about anything, at any time….and why would they not try to hide those numbers?
So, hundreds seem like a good guess, and I will wait to see an in-impeded investigation by a neutral actor, before i rule anything out.
I haven’t followed this closely, but there are photos of a great many destroyed cars that probably weren’t destroyed by Hamas. And Israel initially thought that 200 burnt Hamas corpses were Israeli dead— that is why the Israeli death toll dropped from the initially reported 1400. Think about that. They saw 200 burnt corpses which they had killed and initially thought they were Israeli. It suggests they knew ther own fire was indiscriminate or that they were firing at everything they saw.
Gaza has been an open-air prison for nearly 20 years. Where could Hamas have possible obtained the weaponry needed to blow-up hundreds of moving automobiles and a dozen kibbutz safe-rooms? A bunch of knuckle-heads on motorbikes and hang-gliders waving Kalashnikovs couldn’t have created all those deaths. Haaretz quoted Lt. Col. Nof Erez back on November 9th stating that October 7 was a “mass Hannibal” and Yedioth Ahronoth and Ynet investigative journalists have published similar evidence.
Unlike Hezbollah, who have land and sea routes over which to obtain sophisticated missiles, the Qassam rockets of Hamas are literally junk from the garbage-dump fueled by cleaning products, tipped with unexploded IDF ordinance. They are dangerous because they can’t be aimed and are fired randomly (a crime).
One simply has to read the hate spewed against HaAvoda Labour Zionists and secular Jews by the Revisionist Zionists and Haredi fanatics. The founder of the fascist Revisionist Zionist movement that became today’s Likud, Mussolini-sycophant Ze’ev Jabotinsky, is said to have dismissed them as “peace-lovers and vegetarians.” The terrorists of the Stern Gang, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, and the son of Jabotinsky’s secretary, Bibi Netanyahu, have always worked to marginalize “arab-loving” Israelis who desire peace with Palestine. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was but one casualty of Revisionist Zionist Likudnik hate.
The only rational conclusion is that Shin-bet knew that Hamas was planning a hostage-taking assault and caused weak-points in the border fence funneling it toward left-leaning kibbutzim near Gaza. We know that the Supernova Festival was only moved to Re’im and into the path of the hostage-taking incursion at the last minute.
One is compelled to conclude that October 7 was not only a “mass Hannibal” but a False Flag in which hundreds of left-leaning and secular Jews were slaughtered by IDF arms in order to justify a genocide in Palestine. If this was indeed the case (as I believe it to be) there can be no justification for the invasion of Gaza. Shame on the American leadership and mass media for not ever once questioning the right-wing narrative.
The only rational conclusion is that Shin-bet knew that Hamas was planning a hostage-taking assault
That logical conclusion had already been corroborated three weeks ago by the Israeli MSM itself: Report — New Evidence Reveals IDF Had Detailed Prior Knowledge of Hamas Plan to Raid Israel.
Hamas was armed with knives, AK-47s, and RPG launchers. The IDF had artillery shells (in tanks) and 50 mm machine guns and Hellfire missiles (in helicopters). At least an order of magnitude difference in firepower higher on the IDF side. Look at the damage inflicted on residences and cars and it should be very suggestive of who did what. Also, this isn’t the first time Hamas has busted out and taken hostages (to trade), so we should be able to compare the civilian death count from priors and see if anything looks suspect in how many deaths the US and Israeli governments are attributing to them.
Haaretz has been dribbling this information out slowly. I believe it was several months ago they interviewed an IDF tank commander who said she was ordered to fire into a residence after she had already told her CO that there were Israeli civilians being held in that house. And a helicopter pilot was interviewed at one point and admitted he was not able to distinguish which cars fleeing the rave held Hamas fighters and which didn’t. So he was firing at all of them. The Washington Post and New York Times will stonewall this, of course.
Israel’s information policies are completely untrustworthy. Their initial body count (oh, and the rapes) were put at 4000+, finally reduced to 1100-1300, all “innocent civilians,” of course, even though almost half of those killed when named had military ranks.
No mention as to what such an attack might be a response to, e.g. the blockade, the Settlers being funded and supplied by the government to kill and take the land of non-Jews, random killings of Palestinians, etc., etc.
Agree.
Since those innocent civilians had military rank, they would have had their firearms nearby. If they returned fire, they ceased being civilians.
And in any case, an occupied people have the RIGHT to military redress.
Hamas will make the case that Isreali “innocent civilian” deaths were collateral damage, like those weddings in Afghanistan…..
False. The only time I had weapons at home was when I was stationed on the Golan Heights, and only on active, not reserve, duty.
This is true about the Swiss army, but even they don’t keep ammo at home.
Whatever the truth is the present Biden administration will still not be able to find any evidence of humanitarian violations by the Israelis. The mainstream media will be in lock step with the US foreign policy establishment. This issue has been covered extensively by Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate’ of the Greyzone for quite some time. In reality, the war on Gaza is as much the US’s war as the Israeli’s war. Of course it’s all in the name of “freedom.”
I should add the conventional wisdom is that Joe Biden is a “decent man.”