Media Silent Over Israel’s Use Of The ‘Hannibal Directive’ on 7 October 2023

In an interview with Israeli television last Thursday, Yoav Gallant, the former Israeli defence minister, confirmed that the so-called ‘Hannibal Directive’ was implemented by Israeli military forces on 7 October 2023, the day of attacks by Hamas and other Palestinian fighters.

There had already been strong evidence, including reports by Israeli news media, that Israeli forces killed many Israeli civilians, either in ‘friendly fire’ incidents or by implementing the deadly doctrine, intended to prevent Israelis being captured alive and used as bargaining tools for the release of Palestinians held in Israel.

In March last year, the Al Jazeera investigations team broadcast a thoroughly researched account of what happened on 7 October, debunking Israeli propaganda myths about ‘beheaded babies’ and ‘mass rape’, and including expert analysis of the likely implementation of the Hannibal Directive. Western media ignored the documentary’s careful findings.

In this English subtitled clip from Israel’s Channel 12 interview with Gallant last week, journalist Amit Segal explained to viewers that ‘the Hannibal Directive says to shoot to kill when there is a vehicle containing an Israeli hostage’. Gallant did not dispute the point. The former defence minister, who was sacked from his post by Netanyahu last November, went on to say that the directive was issued ‘tactically’ and ‘in various places’ next to Gaza.

The interview was the first time a senior Israeli official had confirmed that the Hannibal Directive was indeed deployed on 7 October. This remarkable admission has seemingly been blanked by the entire UK news media.

The original directive, which was kept secret and never published, was first implemented during Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon in 1986. It allowed the Israeli military to use any force necessary to prevent Israeli soldiers from being captured and taken into enemy territory, even if such action would lead to those captives’ deaths. After being revised several times, the directive was dropped in 2016.

However, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz last July, it was once again implemented on 7 October 2023 and extended to the killing of Israeli civilians, if that was deemed necessary to prevent them from being abducted by Palestinian fighters.

In this new Israeli television interview, Gallant stated that the directive was used in some places, but not in others and ‘that is a problem’. However, in an article for Electronic Intifada, journalist Asa Winstanley pointed out that:

‘Contrary to Gallant’s statement that the Hannibal Directive was unevenly applied in different areas, Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot reported in January 2024 that at midday on 7 October, an unambiguous order was given from the high command of the Israeli military to invoke the Hannibal Directive across the entire region.’

According to Israeli journalists Ronen Bergman and Yoav Zitun, the order was to be followed, ‘even if this means the endangerment or harming of the lives of civilians in the region, including the captives themselves’.

An investigation published by Electronic Intifada on the first anniversary of the 7 October attacks concluded that Israeli forces, including tanks and helicopters, may have killed hundreds of their own people. Al Jazeera reported that 28 Israeli Apache helicopters used all their ammunition and had to be reloaded.

As far as we can tell from internet and newspaper database searches, there have been no mentions of Gallant’s admission that the Hannibal Directive was in force on 7 October. The most recent – and only – mention of ‘Hannibal Directive’ on the BBC website is from 2015. And we had to go all the way back to 2006 to find the phrase anywhere on the Guardian website. This is a shocking example of propaganda by omission.

As is well-known by now, in part because of an extensive recent piece by Owen Jones, Middle East coverage on the BBC News website is overseen by online MidEast editor Raffi Berg. Jones’s investigation, based on interviews with BBC journalists, past and present, pointed to ‘collective management failure’ in the upper echelons of the BBC. But BBC insiders also stated that Berg ‘micromanages’ the online Middle East news section of the website, ‘ensuring that it fails to uphold impartiality.’

Thus, for example, BBC News stories on the ‘war’ between Israel and Gaza – in other words, the genocide as recognised by scholars, legal experts and human rights organisations – regularly include the following copy-and-pasted sentence:

‘Hamas seized 251 hostages and killed about 1,200 people when it attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, triggering the Gaza war.’

This line resembles an Israeli government press statement. Note that there is no mention that Israeli forces likely killed many of their own citizens on 7 October. Nor is there an indication that the Hamas attacks were ‘triggered’ by decades of brutal Israeli occupation and apartheid. In other words, the BBC template line does not reflect the Palestinian perspective; and it is certainly not impartial, or even accurate, reporting.

One former BBC journalist said of Berg:

‘He did very little to hide his objective of watering down anything critical of Israel.’

And a BBC insider told Jones:

‘Many of us have raised concerns that Raffi has the power to reframe every story, and we are ignored’.

As we have pointed out repeatedly in our alerts and books, media propaganda, whether by commission or omission, is a systemic issue; it is not merely the machinations of particular individuals.

However, institutional groupthink and carrot-and-stick pressures ensure that journalists and editors who reach positions of significant responsibility can only do so by adhering to ‘mainstream’ narratives and news framing that satisfy the requirements of state and corporate power.

This has been seen ever more clearly by large numbers of people since 7 October 2023 in news coverage of Israel and Palestine; especially the glaring deceptions and erasures of the truth. The media’s grip on the public mind may finally be weakening.

DC