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The 7 Days investigation found that “at midday of October 7th, the IDF [Israeli military] instructed all its fighting units to perform the Hannibal Directive in practice, although it did so without stating that name explicitly.”
Well-sourced Israeli military and intelligence reporters Ronen Bergman and Yoav Zitun explained in the long piece that “the instruction was to stop ‘at any cost’ any attempt by Hamas terrorists to return to Gaza, using language very similar to that of the original Hannibal Directive.”
In contrast to the 7 Days investigation, the more recent Haaretz piece found that the name of the doctrine was explicitly invoked – and very early on: “One of these decisions was made at 7:18 am … ‘Hannibal at Erez.'”
Erez is the massive Israeli military checkpoint and base caging Palestinians into the north of the Gaza Strip. It had been totally overrun by Palestinian fighters and besieged Israeli troops seem to have called for an airstrike on their own position.
That the 7 Days investigation reached the conclusion Hannibal was invoked from the top of Israel’s military hierarchy is crucial.
It shows that the reactivation and expansion of the Hannibal Directive that day was not a matter of rogue individual troops or of simple chaos and confusion.
It was a matter of policy.
Orders and chaos
Hannibal was ordered from the top after the generals under the Hakirya building in Tel Aviv realized that Israeli soldiers and settlers all over the Gaza frontier region were being captured en masse.
They wanted the captives dead as soon as possible.
Israeli troops in the field had been trained in the procedure for years and immediately understood what they had to do.
A report by a UN commission quotes one tank commander who opened fire at Israeli captives coming from the settlement of Nir Oz.
“Something in my gut feeling made me think that they [his soldiers] could be on them [the vehicles heading to Gaza],” he said. “Yes, I could have killed them, but I decided that this is the right decision. I prefer stopping the abduction so they won’t be taken.”
Ending Israelis’ captivity by killing them is the Hannibal doctrine in a nutshell.
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