The Israeli military implemented the “Hannibal Directive” during Hamas’ attack on 7 October, killing some of its own civilians and soldiers to prevent Hamas from taking them as captives back to Gaza, according to an investigation by Israel’s leading newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, which will be published in full on 12 January.
The Hebrew edition of the paper wrote on 11 January that “one of the revelations revealed in the investigation is that at noon on October 7, the IDF [Israeli army] ordered all of its combat units in practice to use the ‘Hannibal Procedure’ although without clearly mentioning this explicitly by name.”
The order was to stop “at all costs any attempt by Hamas terrorists to return to Gaza, that is, despite the fear that some of them have abductees,” the paper wrote.
The Times of Israel described how the Hannibal procedure, or directive, “allows soldiers to use potentially massive amounts of force to prevent a soldier from falling into the hands of the enemy. This includes the possibility of endangering the life of the soldier in question in order to prevent his capture.”
A previous 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.”
During the 7 October attack, Hamas and other Palestinians successfully took some 240 Israeli soldiers and civilians from the settlements (also known as kibbutzim) and military bases back to Gaza as captives.
Hamas hoped to exchange them for the thousands of Palestinians, including women and children, held in Israeli prisons.
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.
According to Yediot Ahronoth, about a thousand “terrorists and infiltrators” were killed in the area between the settlements and the Gaza Strip.
But the paper added it is not clear at this time how many of the Israeli abductees were killed due to the activation of the Hannibal directive:
“In the week after the attack, soldiers of elite units checked about 70 vehicles that were left in the area between the 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.”
As journalist Dan Cohen reported, the Israeli military killed Efrat Katz, age 68, as she was being taken from Kibbutz Nir Oz to Gaza on a cart pulled by a tractor on 7 October. Her daughter, Doron Katz-Asher, and two granddaughters, Raz, age 2, and Aviv, age 4, were also in the cart.
Hellbound and Down 