WHAT ISRAEL WANTS KEPT A SECRET

Caught completely unprepared, most of the soldiers manning the bases were either killed or captured and taken back to Gaza as prisoners of war.

A reported 255 Israelis were captured, including soldiers and civilians. Since then, 154 of them have been released, mostly by Hamas in November’s prisoner exchange.

However, the figure of those released also includes some bodies of dead captives, mostly killed in Israeli strikes on Gaza. Of the remaining 101 prisoners, 35 have been officially declared dead by Israel. The real number is likely much higher.

Many have been killed by Israeli carpet bombing, and three escaped prisoners were shot dead by Israeli ground troops in Gaza City in December.

Al-Aqsa Flood was the first time in history that Palestinian armed groups were able to retake Palestinian territories lost since 1948, however briefly.

Israel’s response was also unprecedented, if not in its nature then undoubtedly in its scale – an undisguised genocide against the population of Gaza.

One “conservative” estimate published by the British medical journal The Lancet in July stated that as many as 186,000 Palestinians are likely to have been killed by Israel so far – almost 10 percent of Gaza’s population.

The UN says that 90 percent of people in Gaza have been driven out of their homes by Israel and that about a quarter of all structures in the strip have been destroyed.

The Western press took its lead from official Israeli disinformation. It was soon awash with lurid atrocity propaganda.

These lies about rape and beheaded babies were swiftly debunked by The Electronic Intifada and a small group of over the cracks of its military and intelligence defeat, Israel has also been desperate to cover up another major scandal.

That Israel killed hundreds of its own people between 7 and 9 October 2023.

The regime ideologically justified this within Israeli society using a well-established national murder-suicide pact known in Israel as the “Hannibal Directive.”

The Electronic Intifada today presents a full overview of how Israel killed so many of its own people during the Palestinian offensive.

This article is based on a year’s worth of The Electronic Intifada’s investigative reporting, extensive monitoring and translation of the Hebrew-language Israeli media, independent examination of hundreds of videos, a recent pro-Israel film broadcast by the BBC and Paramount+ about the Supernova rave, official Israeli figures of the dead and a little-read UN Human Rights Council report.

We can conclude that during the Al-Aqsa Flood offensive:

other independent media – often at the cost of being smeared by mainstream media and banned or censored by social media giants like YouTube.

Israel expanded the use of its murderous “Hannibal Directive” – designed to prevent soldiers from being taken alive as prisoners of war – by killing many of its own civilians.

The use of such “Hannibal” strikes are confirmed in a UN report published in June.

Fire from Israeli helicopters, drones, tanks and even ground troops was deliberately undertaken in order to prevent Palestinian fighters from taking live Israeli captives who could be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners.

At the initiative of the local Gaza Division, “Hannibal” was carried out right away: less than an hour after the Palestinian offensive began.

By midday, an unambiguous order was given from the high command of the Israeli military (the so-called “Pit” headquarters, deep under Israel’s Hakirya building in downtown Tel Aviv) to invoke the Hannibal Directive throughout the entire region, “even if this means the endangerment or harming of the lives of civilians in the region, including the captives themselves.”

This bombing of Israeli captives by Israel continues in Gaza even today.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted in a December meeting with released captives and families of captives that they had been “under our bombardments” in Gaza.

Hundreds of Israelis were likely killed by Israel itself in “Hannibal” targeting incidents as well as unintentional crossfire.

Israel has been engaged in an aggressive cover-up of its crimes against its own people.

Killing their own people

If Hamas made a miscalculation in the planning of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, it was perhaps to overestimate the value Israeli planners assigned to the lives of their own people.

In 2006, Hamas successfully captured Israeli occupation soldier Gilad Shalit, exchanging him for 1,024 Palestinian prisoners in 2011 – including the current leader of Hamas Yahya Sinwar. A similar exchange was made with the Lebanese resistance in 2008.

Although exchanging prisoners is a common element of conflict, Israeli leaders felt weakened and embarrassed by what they saw as compromises. So they secretly modified their policies, preparing to strike with lethal force against their own people in the event of future captures. At the heart of these plans was the Hannibal Directive, established in secret by Israeli generals in 1986, and named after an ancient Carthaginian general who killed himself rather than be captured alive by the Roman Empire