Consortium News, 7 March 2025
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There is a pressing reason to keep our attention focused on the role of the Hannibal directive, writes Jonathan Cook. It relates to what is happening right now.
Palestinians in Gaza on Jan. 29, after the ceasefire announced earlier in the month. (Jaber Jehad Badwan, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
Those of us who keep banging on about Israel’s use of the so-called Hannibal directive on Oct. 7, 2023, — in which Israel killed its own citizens to stop them being taken captive by Hamas — have been smeared as excusing Hamas crimes that day.
That is not why we flag the issue.
In part, it is because some of the most horrifying images from Oct. 7 of charred bodies and wrecked cars and homes in Israel — adduced as evidence of an especial barbarism that is supposedly typical of Palestinians — were almost certainly caused by Israel invoking its scorched-earth directive that day.
Those images became central to the propaganda blitz launched by Israel and its apologists to justify the mass slaughter of Gaza’s children over the subsequent 17 months.
But there is also a far more urgent and pressing reason to keep our attention focused on the role of the Hannibal directive. And it relates to what is happening right now.
[President Donald Trump has issued military threats about the consequences of not handing over Israeli hostages that Hamas says, if carried out, break the terms of the ceasefire.]
Israel and the U.S. are still applying the Hannibal directive — against the Israeli captives held in Gaza.
The point of the directive has always been to stop the enemy being able to use Israeli hostages as leverage to draw Israel into negotiations — primarily to pressure it to hand over any of the thousands of Palestinian hostages it holds in its prison-torture camps. Many of them have never been charged or tried.
Israel and the U.S. tell us they need to carpet bomb Gaza — in what amounts to a “plausible” genocide, according to the world’s highest court — to force Hamas to return the Israeli captives. But in fact, Israel and the U.S. are recklessly killing those very same captives through their actions.
Why? So they don’t have to negotiate over a ceasefire. So they can carry on with the genocide, without pressure to deal with the fate of the Israelis held in Gaza.
“Bring Them Home” — a giant lights sign by artist Nadav Barnea at Charles Bronfman Auditorium, Heichal Hatarbut, Tel Aviv, Jan. 3, 2024. (Yossipik, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
It was exactly the same reckless approach on Oct. 7, when Israel showed it was indifferent as to whether Israelis lived or died so long as they weren’t taken captive.
[See: What We’re Not Hearing About Oct 7]
That’s why — in one instance we know about — the Israeli military fired into a home in Kibbutz Be’eri, knowing that there were a dozen or more Israelis inside, including children.
The army was completely indifferent as to whether those Israelis would be killed as a result. All but two were. Those witnesses are the main reason we know what really happened.
That’s why Israel’s Apache helicopters recklessly fired on hundreds of cars fleeing the Nova music festival, indifferent to whether the cars contained Hamas fighters or Israeli citizens.
Even the former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, admits the directive was invoked that day.
We’ll never know how many Israelis were killed – in part because Israel will never let us know. It’s even buried many of the destroyed cars to stop a forensic investigation.
But what we do know with certainty is that the Israeli military killed many Israelis on Oct. 7.
Western media have studiously refused to report on the issue of the Hannibal directive, even though it is all over the Israeli media. (See here, here, here and here.)
That is more than just a failure by Western media outlets. It is a crime against journalism — if not complicity in the genocide itself.
Western publics need to know that the Hannibal directive was invoked for a very simple reason: It is a crucial piece of information for assessing the credibility of Israeli and U.S. claims that they are trying to get the Israeli captives back alive and to properly weigh Israel’s motives in returning to the genocide in Gaza.
Notice how, in Trump’s latest deranged tweet, he accuses Hamas of “murdering” the Israelis held in Gaza. That’s pure, Israeli-inspired disinformation.
It is clear that most, if not all, of the dead captives were killed not by their Hamas captors but by Israel’s massive, reckless 15-month bombardment of the tiny territory of Gaza. That same bombardment, the equivalent of six Hiroshimas, has leveled Gaza and killed many tens of thousands — maybe hundreds of thousands — of Palestinians.
Why is Trump so eager to misdirect us?
Because he wants to win our support for Israel’s continuation of its slaughter of the people of Gaza and justify his own decision to supply, as his predecessor did, the weapons needed to continue that genocide.
After all, Trump makes his own genocidal intent expressly clear in addressing “the people of Gaza” and telling them that they will all be “DEAD” if the Israeli captives aren’t handed over. Yet “the people of Gaza” have no control over whether the captives are released.
Notice too that Trump calls Hamas “sick and twisted” for holding
on to the bodies of dead Israeli captives, even though it is Israel that
is violating the ceasefire agreement that would see those bodies
returned.
This has become a further rationalisation by Israel and the U.S. for killing “the people of Gaza.” But Hamas learnt the value of using dead bodies as bargaining chips directly from Israel.
For years, the Israeli government has had a policy of refusing to return to their families the corpses of those Palestinians it has killed, including while in its torture camps. This violation of international law long predates Oct. 7. The Israeli courts have repeatedly approved the policy, accepting the government’s view that the bodies should be held as “bargaining chips.” It gave its backing again in January.
So if Hamas is “sick and twisted,” it is only because Israel is even more sick and twisted. If Trump thinks the people of Gaza deserve a genocide because of their leaders’ “sick and twisted” decisions, should he not be consistent and argue that the people of Israel deserve a similar fate for their own leaders’ “sick and twisted” decisions?
A campaign of lies and disinformation have helped to shred international law over the past year and half. And one of the biggest lies is the pretence that, in slaughtering Gaza’s children, Israel has been acting in the interests of Israelis held in the enclave.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.
This article is from the author’s blog, Jonathan Cook.net.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Tags: Hamas Hannibal Directive Israeli hostages Jonathan Cook Oct. 7 President Donald Trump
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