Deliberate ‘friendly fire’ ordered repeatedly in at least 8 locations
Israel’s media are now admitting that Israeli forces were repeatedly ordered to shoot at their own citizens in a mass ‘Hannibal directive’ that killed large numbers of those who died on 7 October during the Hamas raid.
An Israeli military spokesman said months ago that it would be inappropriate to investigate the ‘friendly fire’ killings because the number was so ‘immense and complex’ – an admission ignored by UK media – and the fact of such killings has been referred to in Israeli media reports before now. But now Haaretz, which had previously denied reports by independent media, has admitted that Israeli forces were told not to allow a single vehicle to cross the border back into Gaza – and that this meant killing many Israelis:
message conveyed at 11:22 A.M. across the Gaza Division network was understood by everyone. “Not a single vehicle can return to Gaza” was the order.
At this point, the IDF was not aware of the extent of kidnapping along the Gaza border, but it did know that many people were involved. Thus, it was entirely clear what that message meant, and what the fate of some of the kidnapped people would be.
This was not the first order given by the division with the intent of foiling kidnapping even at the expense of the lives of the kidnapped, a procedure known in the army as the “Hannibal procedure.”…
…Haaretz does not know whether or how many civilians and soldiers were hit due to these procedures, but the cumulative data indicates that many of the kidnapped people were at risk, exposed to Israeli gunfire, even if they were not the target.
The ‘Hannibal directive‘ is an Israeli military doctrine dictating the intentional killing of Israelis to prevent them being taken captive by Palestinian resistance groups and being used as leverage for the release of the thousands of Palestinians held hostage in arbitrary detention and routinely subject to torture and sexual violence. The first Hannibal order was given around 7am on 7 October and re-issued repeatedly – several times an hour – throughout the day until late in the evening in at least eight different locations, including military bases, civilian areas and border crossings and the Nova music festival, hitting both military personnel and civilians.
Confirming the ‘widespread’ use of the directive, the Haaretz article states:
Documents obtained by Haaretz, as well as testimonies of soldiers, mid-level and senior IDF officers, reveal a host of orders and procedures laid down by the Gaza Division, Southern Command and the IDF General Staff up to the afternoon hours of that day, showing how widespread this procedure was, from the first hours following the attack and at various points along the border.
And the paper says it received confirmation from senior military sources that the entire border zone was intentionally turned into a killing field designed to prevent either hostages or resistance fighters crossing into Gaza:
A new development occurred at 2:00 P.M. All the forces were instructed not to exit border communities toward the west, in the direction of the border, with an emphasis on not chasing terrorists. At that point, the border area was under intense fire, directed at anyone in that area, making it a danger zone.
“The instruction,” says the source in Southern Command, “was meant to turn the area around the border fence into a killing zone, closing it off toward the west.”
The fact of the mass killing of Israeli citizens by their own military has been reported by independent media, including Skwawkbox, since only a few weeks after the raid. It has been ignored by western media, which have instead continued – with almost no exceptions – to promote disproven Israeli atrocity propaganda designed to justify Israel’s mass murder of almost 190,000 Palestinian civilians and its blockade that is starving almost two million.
Former Israeli ambassador to the UK, Mark Regev, gave the first – if inadvertent – admission of mass ‘friendly fire’ killings when he told an interviewer that Israel had reduced its official 7 October death toll from 1,400 to 1,200 because two hundred burned bodies it thought were Israeli were in fact Palestinians. The Palestinians had clearly not been killed by their own side, which in any case did not have weapons that could incinerate the hundreds of Israeli cars seen in footage of the aftermath of the raid.
Israel has used the 7 October victims to dehumanise Palestinians as justification for its genocidal assault on Gaza, which has primarily targeted women and children. It even used a dead Israeli child as ‘poster child’ for its atrocity propaganda who was killed by shells from an Israeli tank that attacked her house despite troops knowing that her family was inside.
Social media firms appear to have colluded with ‘mainstream’ media and western governments in suppressing the spread of awareness of the damning reality. The UK’s new Starmer government has told Israel it will try to persuade the International Criminal Court at the Hague not to issue arrest warrants for Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister Yoav Gallant for their war crimes. The UK Israel lobby is trying to overturn the election of a number of new independent MPs elected on an anti-genocide platform.
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