Here’s some relevant links and information re: October 7, 2023:

At midday on 7 October Israel’s supreme military command ordered all units to prevent the capture of Israeli citizens “at any cost” – even by firing on them.

The military “instructed all its fighting units to perform the Hannibal Directive in practice, although it did so without stating that name explicitly,” Israeli journalists revealed last weekend.

The revelations came in a new investigative article by Ronen Bergman and Yoav Zitun, two journalists with extensive sources inside Israel’s military and intelligence establishment.

They also revealed that “some 70 vehicles” driven by Palestinian fighters returning to Gaza were blown up by Israeli helicopter gunships, drones or tanks.

Many of these vehicles contained Israeli captives.

The journalists wrote that “it is not clear at this stage how many of the captives were killed due to the operation of this order” to the air force that they should prevent return to Gaza at all costs.

“At least in some of the cases, everyone in the vehicle was killed,” the journalists explain.

The Hebrew piece has not been translated into English by its publisher, Yedioth Ahronoth, a newspaper which translates many of its articles. You can read The Electronic Intifada’s full English version, translated by Dena Shunra, below.

The secretive “Hannibal” doctrine is named after an ancient Carthaginian general who poisoned himself rather than be captured alive by the Roman Empire.

The order aims at stopping Israelis from being taken captive by resistance fighters who could later use them as leverage in prisoner swap deals.

“Overpowered”

The latest revelations confirm The Electronic Intifada’s reporting since 7 October that many – if not most – of the Israeli civilians killed that day were killed by Israel itself, not Palestinian fighters.

Initial claims stated that 1,400 Israelis were killed by Hamas in the Palestinian assault that began on 7 October. But Israel has repeatedly revised this figure downwards, so that it now stands at “over 1,000.”

It was also clear from the outset that hundreds of the dead were in fact Israeli soldiers.

Hamas maintains that they targeted military bases and outposts, and that their aim was to capture rather than kill Israeli civilians, and to kill or capture Israeli soldiers.

Based on interviews with those present, the new article says that top officers at Israel’s underground military headquarters in Tel Aviv on 7 October declared in shock that “the Gaza Division was overpowered.”

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