Asa Winstanley, Electronic Intifada:
Vehicles stacked up near the southern Israeli town of Netivot, near Gaza, in November. They were destroyed soon after Palestinian fighters began taking captives on 7 October. A new investigation by Israeli journalists has concluded that 70 such vehicles were blown up by Israeli fire. (Jim Hollander UPI)
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.
