October 7, 2023 arrived not as a day of confusion alone but as a moral rupture. As Hamas drove blazing convoys and armed men through Israel’s border towns, the army’s response included an old, ugly instruction — the Hannibal Directive — which turns the logic of protection on its head: prevent kidnappings by any means, even if that means killing the people you claim you are protecting.
Let’s be blunt. Investigations and contemporaneous orders show this was not a rumor whispered in a bunker. At 7:18 a.m. an order that reporters have reconstructed as “Hannibal at Erez” was sent — the signal, according to multiple investigative accounts, that commanders authorized extreme measures to stop abductions. Within hours, other dispatches and field orders — understood by combat units as “not a single vehicle can return to Gaza” — transformed a chaotic battlefield into, for many zones, a killing corridor.
What did that look like on the ground? Tanks, artillery and close air assets were used to interdict suspected routes. Houses where civilians were being held — hostages still alive inside — were struck amid frantic attempts to retake them. The case of Kibbutz Be’eri haunts every sober account: a house with 14 people inside was struck in the maelstrom of that day; 13 of them died. Investigations later documented serious failures in troop conduct, command-and-control, and judgment at Be’eri. The question no longer reads as theoretical: did the army’s own doctrine and its hurried application help to kill the people it sought to save?
And yes — the admission came. Yoav Gallant, then defence minister, publicly acknowledged that the Hannibal procedure was given in certain places — a tacit validation that these were not isolated mistakes but commands that were sometimes authorised from the top. “In some places it was given, and in other places it was not given, and that is a problem,” he said — an understatement that reads like a confession.
If this was about operational necessity, we must still ask the brutal moral questions. Rules of engagement are not abstract; they decide whether a state will shoot to stop a prisoner exchange or shoot to prevent a prisoner ever exchanging hands. A policy that counts the prevention of abduction above the life of the abducted flips the social contract inside out. It asks citizens to trade their bodies for the illusion of security.
The official line from the IDF — that internal investigations are underway and findings will be published — is necessary but no longer sufficient as a political salve. Admitting a probe is the bare minimum. Families, survivors, human-rights bodies and any honest citizen deserve clear answers: who authorised which strikes, what intelligence justified them, and how will accountability be applied where the line between “preventing kidnapping” and “ordering death” was crossed?
October 7 should be the last time a defensive doctrine is allowed to read like an execution warrant for one’s own people. If the investigations find systemic errors, vagueness in the chain of command, or an ideological prioritization of deterrence over life, then those responsible — at every level — should not simply be reassigned or praised for “toughness.” They should face public scrutiny and legal review.
We are owed one simple thing: the truth, laid out with dates, orders, transcripts and names — not euphemisms and delayed reviews. The state cannot hold a policy that privileges capture prevention above life and then pretend a few internal memos and “lessons learned” absolve it. If a democracy will shield its people from enemies abroad, it must not be permitted to strike them down at home while calling the shots “defense.”
— End of post.
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