When news hit on 7 October 2023 that the Palestinian resistance had launched a large-scale assault out of the besieged Gaza Strip into surrounding zionist-occupied Palestinian territories, there was at first widespread shock that Israel could have been caught so unaware.
As it became clear that not only hundreds of Palestinians but also 767 Israeli civilians and 376 Israeli soldiers had died during the event, an avalanche of condemnation filled western media. Reporters for imperialist and zionist media had no hesitation in laying all the deaths at the door of the resistance, and the alleged brutality and inhumanity of the Palestinian operation was illustrated by a wealth of graphic and supposedly ‘eye-witness’ detail.
Atrocity porn onslaught
With ritualistic consistency western news agencies and politicians endlessly circulated what were actually unsubstantiated atrocity stories that had been manufactured by the Israeli state.
A particularly horrific but entirely uncorroborated report from one Israeli reporter that 40 babies had been beheaded, for example, led to this claim being carried on front pages across the world, and being repeated as proven fact by US president Joe Biden and other western leaders. The same thing was repeated following equally fictitious ‘accounts’ of serial rape by resistance fighters.
Disinformation – fake news that is spread deliberately – about the war in Gaza circulated like wildfire across western social media platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, with the main western news agencies and politicians regurgitating the lies without a moment’s pause for verification. The vision of Israelis as the innocent victims of a deranged and inhuman Arab intifada was once again promoted around the world.
In the face of the high death toll, referred to by US vice president Kamala Harris as the “worst atrocity against the jewish people since the holocaust”, Israel tried to build its case for a Palestinian genocide against jewish Israelis. What it tried to conceal, however, was how many of those killed on 7 October 2023 were actually killed by Israeli armed forces.
Even at the time, independent investigative journalists such as Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate from the Grayzone and the journalists from Electronic Infitada, among others, gave the world a different perspective, one rich in journalistic detail, perspective and objective historical analysis.
Hannibal directive in full operation
The coverage of these brave independent voices provided a very different assessment of the western media narrative. In particular, they exposed the Israeli military’s deliberate killing of Israeli civilians who had been taken captive by Palestinian militants during the Al-Aqsa Flood operation.
They revealed that the so-called Israeli ‘Defence’ Force (IDF) had employed its ‘Hannibal directive’ and in doing so, was responsible for many of the deaths the zionists and their imperialist backers were attributing to Hamas.
The Hannibal directive was originally drafted in mid-1986. The original order referred to the use of small arms fire, particularly selective sniper fire, to hit captors or stop their vehicle – “even if that means hitting our soldiers. In any case, everything will be done to stop the vehicle and prevent it from escaping.”
In essence, it is a directive for killing Israeli citizens rather than letting them be taken alive by their adversaries as prisoners of war.
Despite the controversy and furious media debate that ensued at the time, there was no public backlash against the IDF for employing this tactic, in which killing its own soldiers was seen as preferable to allowing Palestinians to gain valuable hostages.
One of the reasons for the acceptance of this doctrine concerned the disparity between the number of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel versus the few Israeli soldiers ever captured by the resistance. Such a discrepancy made exchanges lopsided and weakened Israel’s position.
The disparity was glaringly revealed by the case of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who was captured during the Lebanon war in June 2006. He was eventually handed back to Israel in 2011 in return for the release of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, including the current prime minister of Gaza, Yahya Sinwar.
In a 2009 Haaretz interview, Brigadier-General Moti Baruch spelled out with uncommon frankness the significance of the Hannibal directive. It is, he said, “unequivocal” and applies “at every level, beginning with the individual soldier”.
Now an Israeli army investigation into the events of 7 October and a United Nations report are the latest official investigations which corroborate the factual reporting carried out last October by the Grayzone and others.
A very senior IDF source has now confirmed to the Haaretz newspaper in Tel Aviv that the Hannibal directive was in full effect on 7 October. Documents obtained by Haaretz, as well as testimonies of soldiers and IDF officers of various ranks, reveal that the directive was operational from the first hours following the attack and at various points along the Gaza border. (IDF ordered Hannibal directive on 7 October to prevent Hamas taking soldiers captive by Yaniv Kubovich, 7 July 2024)
None of this was actually news. As Max Blumenthal pointed out in an interview with Chris Hedges in November 2023:
“It’s important to understand that the main goal in this Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad military offensive was to gather as many captives as possible, particularly Israeli soldiers, in order to trigger the prisoner exchange that was witnessed when Gilad Shalit in 2011 was released …
“So this entire Al-Aqsa Flood operation is understood against the backdrop of the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange. Gunmen were sent with detailed maps to population centres and military bases. In the military bases, they were obviously given instructions to attack and kill Israeli soldiers who were maintaining the siege of Gaza.
“Much of the Gaza division, which has also been responsible for so many massacres inside Gaza over the years, was wiped out … was immediately overrun by gunmen as a military target, and with all these soldiers inside, the head of the Gaza division actually went into an underground bunker.
“He recounted this story to Haaretz and how he made the ‘tough decision’ to send Hellfire missiles onto the Erez crossing [between occupied Palestine and Gaza] from Apache helicopters. This was the beginning of the ‘Iron Swords’ operation that Netanyahu declared several days later, which is essentially the carpet bombing of Gaza.
“Apache helicopters were scrambled in the morning. The assault began around 6.00am at daybreak, and by 10.30am, according to Israeli media accounts, all of the special force’s commando teams, and the well-trained Hamas teams had already left. By that point, there were two squadrons of Apache helicopters that had been scrambled, and they were not even at full strength until 12.00pm.
“So you have action at Erez crossing, and then you have Kibbutz Be’eri, which is the site that registered the most casualties of non-combatants. I counted something like 150 among the confirmed death toll printed at Haaretz and most of them were not soldiers. These were people who were caught in the crossfire, Hamas gunmen had tried to take them captive, and there were stand-offs in their homes. By the time Israeli special forces arrived, many of those stand-offs had either ended or they ended them simply by shelling people’s homes with tanks.
“According to Yasmin Porat, who had fled the electronic music festival – which had come under attack, which was held right between Kibbutz Be’eri and Kibbutz Rahim, which also have military bases essentially embedded within them … so many captives were taken.
“This woman, Yasmin Porat, fled to Kibbutz Be’eri, went into a home with her partner, and then they were taken captive momentarily by gunmen. She recounted to Israeli national radio that when the Israeli special forces arrived, they started shooting everyone, and that most of the captives, along with the Hamas gunmen, were caught in the crossfire, and that everyone was killed except for her and her captor, who used her as a human shield in order to guarantee his own safety when he surrendered.
“She saw her own partner, whose hands had been bound by her captors, get shot by Israeli special forces, and then they lobbed two tank shells into the home that she had been in. So if you look at the pictures of Kibbutz Be’eri, they look like the homes in Gaza that I’ve seen that came under shelling from Israeli tanks and Israeli artillery. There’s no way that Hamas gunmen could have done that much structural damage to this entire kibbutz with the small arms that they were equipped with; Kalashnikovs and some RPGs.
“I24, an Israeli foreign ministry-sponsored propaganda network, actually went to this kibbutz on a guided tour and said they saw tank tracks everywhere. It’s obvious what happened there, and it was stated clearly by the security coordinator of Kibbutz Be’eri. He was on a hotline with the Israeli military command and they decided to shell houses on top of their occupants, including Israeli civilians.” (Did Israel’s military kill its own civilians on 7 OCtober?, The Real News Network)
Continued campaign against the truth
Nine months after the event, the truth can no longer be denied, so instead it is being ignored. When they reported this inconvenient truth last October, journalists were doxed by western corporate media, who dubbed Max Blumenthal, for example, as a “master manipulator” and (ironically) a “propagandist”. Now the facts have been admitted by the Israeli army itself, they are simply being buried.
In a recent Washington Post article on the army’s review, for example, the paper doesn’t refer to the Hannibal directive or to the most scandalous aspects of Israel’s response to the 7 October attack until the very end of a long piece, when it finally mentions the fact that one of Israel’s highest-ranking generals, Brigadier General Barak Hiram, ordered an Israeli tank to fire on a home filled with Israelis who were being held captive by Palestinian militants – thus killing 14 Israeli civilians.
If there were any fairness or honesty in western media, headlines across the world would be screaming the truth, but needless to say this has not happened. Although it is now thought that a majority of the civilians who died on 7 October were killed by their own government, and this is an open secret in Israel itself, many of those around the world whose only understanding of the war in Palestine comes from western media headlines will continue to assume that the stories about ‘1,200 Israelis killed by terrorists’, ‘40 beheaded babies’ et al are uncontested facts.
Undoubtedly, the rabid rulers of the imperialist world won’t allow something like truth to stand in their way. Truth is a trifle to be smeared with propaganda and buried by an avalanche of lies like the bodies of unnumbered Palestinian children presently lying beneath the rubble in Gaza.
Israeli media reported that by its own admission, the IDF has concluded that Israeli soldiers killed many of their own people on 7 October. This inconvenient truth will inevitably be buried along with the 100,000+ Palestinians murdered by Israel in its subsequent genocidal campaign of retribution – until the final victory of the resistance paves the way for a fact-based writing of history.
