By Alon Mizrahi
1. It has been my suspicion for a long time that Israel killed a great number of its own casualties on October 7. We know about dozens who died at IDF hands for certain already, but the scale of the use of Hannibal Directive is only gradually coming out.
Today in Haaretz, Yaniv Kubovich, one of Israel’s finest journalists, provides a peek into how extensive the use of that directive was on the day.
For long hours of October 7, ‘No vehicle is going back into Gaza’ was the standing order, Kubovich reveals. IDF forces were ordered to make the area between Israel and Gaza a death zone for everyone and anything.
2. What does it even mean that a military has an order to eliminate its own soldiers and civilians if there’s a suspicion they are being kidnapped? Has any military in history given such an order to its troops? What does it mean about the psychology of Israeli soldiers, who may be required to kill their comrades at any given moment? How can actual camaraderie develop under such conditions? Has anybody given serious thought to this lunatic policy and its devastating meaning? Or was it done, in standard Israeli fashion, as a brain fart improvisation that stuck?
3. Rules always expand and encroach, and so, inevitably, the Hanibal Directive is applied more frequently for more situations that may have been considered gray areas under the former, softer insanity. But think about the mentality of high-ranking Israeli officers, who are basically given sweeping permission to eliminate their subordinates when a kidnapping is suspected. Can they see they’re soldiers as important human beings that matter under such conditions? Of course not.
4. Palestinians are said to be the religious crazies who don’t value life, but we’ve never seen Hamas members shoot at their own to prevent them from falling into Israeli hands – even as they know what awaits them in captivity: unimaginable torture and humiliation potentially to death.
Israel is always (and quite comically, at this stage) presented as a normal and life-loving vibrant democracy, but what does it say about its mental health such an order exists?
5. Can you imagine what would happen if it was discovered that American or British soldiers killed dozens or hundreds of their own service men and women, and civilians, ‘to prevent them from being kidnapped’? Could you imagine the complete and devastating outrage? In Israel, it is not even news. It doesn’t matter. It’s a smallish side issue we don’t talk about.
6. The Hannibal Directive lets us see the breathtaking derangement of Zionism: it creates people who would rather kill their own than have to deal with an enemy as a human equal. Once an Israeli becomes a hostage, their existence is perceived as a threat to collective pride, which is more important than life, making them an unbearable burden. I’d say there is a more pressing need to kill potential hostages than the people who took them, as they embody leverage that can potentially diminish Israel’s sense of absolute human superiority.
And this is so insane, so extreme, so bizarre and uncanny that no establishment can even recognize it and its meaning, so everyone acts as if this utterly clinical show of deadly exceptionalism does not even exist
