Electronic Intifada journalist Asa Winstanley has marked the one-year anniversary of 7 October by releasing the article How Israel killed hundreds of its own people on 7 October. In it, the outlet gives “a full overview” of a “major scandal” that Israel propagandists wanted the Western media to ignore. This was the revelation “that Israel killed hundreds of its own people between 7 and 9 October 2023”, namely under the Hannibal Directive, which preferred the murder of Israeli soldiers over allowing them to become hostages.

Israel: “An aggressive cover-up of its crimes against its own people”

Winstanley writes that Israel understood on 7 October 2023 that Hamas-led fighters from Gaza had temporarily “overpowered” Israeli soldiers. The Palestinian forces reportedly captured 255 Israeli hostages, including soldiers. Israeli occupation forces would kill some of these either indirectly or directly in the coming months of its genocidal assault on Gaza.

Western media outlets, however, were very quick to take Israeli disinformation as fact. As he says, the press “was soon awash with lurid atrocity propaganda”. As he insists:

These lies about rape and beheaded babies were swiftly debunked by The Electronic Intifada and a small group of other independent media – often at the cost of being smeared by mainstream media and banned or censored by social media giants like YouTube.

The article includes insights that The Electronic Intifada gained through its investigations, media monitoring, video analysis, “a recent pro-Israel film broadcast by the BBC and Paramount+”, official Israeli statistics, and a UN report. It concludes that Israeli implementation of the Hannibal Directive was official, almost immediate, and deliberate. Also, it took place in the knowledge of the risk of “endangerment or harming of the lives of civilians in the region, including the captives themselves”.

In fact, it is clear that it targeted civilians as well as soldiers, as it continues to do in Gaza today. And although it’s likely that Israeli forces killed hundreds of Israelis intentionally (in addition to in “unintentional crossfire”) and there has been a UN report confirming the use of this tactic, many people around the world are unaware of it. The reason, it stresses, is that “Israel has been engaged in an aggressive cover-up of its crimes against its own people”.

Hamas overestimated “the value Israeli planners assigned to the lives of their own people”

Winstanley writes that:

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.

He adds that:

multiple Israeli press reports have now confirmed that Hannibal was not only reactivated on 7 October – if it ever truly went away – but was actually extended to captured Israeli civilians on their way to Gaza.

Released hostages, meanwhile, have described how “the main threat to their lives while they were held in Gaza was not Hamas, but Israeli attacks”. One, for example, described how “Hamas guards put mattresses over us on the floor to cover us, and then they covered us with their bodies to protect us from our own forces’ shooting”. Another stated, “We were sitting in tunnels and we were very afraid that, not Hamas, but Israel would kill us”. Another, meanwhile, insisted they “were shot at by a helicopter when we were on our way to Gaza”.

One Israeli media outlet “reached the conclusion Hannibal was invoked from the top of Israel’s military hierarchy”. That, Winstanley writes:

shows that the reactivation and expansion of the Hannibal Directive that day was not a matter of rogue individual troops or of simple chaos and confusion.

It was a matter of policy.

There were numerous officials who revealed this. A tank commander, for example, admitted probably firing on Israelis. A colonel, meanwhile, said Israel’s response to the Hamas attack “was a mass Hannibal”. And the military itself accepted that there had been an “immense and complex quantity” of “friendly fire” events.

7 October was not how the media painted it

As Winstanley points out, the Hamas attack on 7 October was not an ‘evil terrorist rampage’. The target was always the Israeli military on the border of Gaza – which human-rights experts had long called an ‘open-air prison‘. Civilians died, for a number of reasons, but Hamas “had been told not to target civilians during the assault”.

One point Winstanley mentioned that caused a higher-than-expected civilian death toll was that Hamas intelligence were apparently unaware of the “Supernova” rave that was going on “less than three miles from the Re’im military base” – “the headquarters of the Israeli army’s Gaza Division – the number one target” of the attack. It was not a target, and even “Israeli intelligence has concluded that the Palestinians had no prior knowledge of the rave”. Supernova’s organisers had “coordinated with the local Israeli police force” but had not announced the location before 6 October.

While it’s difficult to know how many people at the rave Israel killed and how many Palestinians killed, Winstanley says:

What is known is that Israeli armed forces on site set up a roadblock at the main exit, causing a massive backlog of cars waiting to leave the site. Many ravers ended up fleeing on foot, east across the fields as the firefight broke out.

Journalist William Van Wagenen, he says, has argued that “the roadblock likely led to Israeli forces unintentionally trapping some escaping ravers in a firefight”.

The ‘widespread use of psychoactive drugs’ among ravers didn’t help to reduce the chaos, either.

A UN report, meanwhile, has noted that “Israeli helicopters were present at the Nova site and may have shot at targets on the ground, including civilian vehicles”.

Israel: difficulties counting the casualties

There were hundreds of Israeli aircraft or drone attacks on “targets” near the border on 7 October. Instructions were reportedly to “shoot at everything”. One Israeli media investigation noted that, according to military investigators, of around 70 vehicles they examined that had been hit by Israeli forces, “at least in some of the cases, everyone in the vehicle was killed”. Winstanley says:

It is unknown how many Israelis those 70 vehicles contained, but given what is known about other incidents, some cars probably contained several. These vehicles alone may have accounted for a very large number of Israeli civilian deaths.

Looking at one car scrapyard, he notes that:

Photos and drone footage of the scrapyard clearly showed many of the cars were completely flattened and twisted in a manner consistent with Israeli bombing from the air.

Adding that it possibly contained “1,650 vehicles”, he stresses that:

it does seem entirely plausible that Israel killed hundreds of the Israelis who died during the course of the offensive

In one case in particular, survivors of one Israeli attack said “everyone else in and around the building was either shot or “burned completely” by the Israeli tank fire”. And as Winstanley highlights:

Similar incidents happened elsewhere. But in most places, there were few survivors, especially of the aerial bombardments.

Indeed, “the UN report lists a surprisingly high number of places where Hannibal attacks possibly or certainly took place”.

We’ll probably never know the truth

7 October 2023 resulted in “a maximum of 780 dead Israeli civilians”, Winstanley calculates. But how many did Israel kill, and how many did Palestinians kill? He insists “it is impossible to know without a truly independent international investigation”, but “Israel is blocking just such an investigation”.

Because “very few autopsies were carried out”, “many bodies were prematurely buried”, and many destroyed Israeli cars “were crushed by Israeli authorities”, a lot of the potential evidence of Israeli military crimes no longer exists. The UN, however, “documented strong indications that the ‘Hannibal Directive’ was used in several instances on 7 October, harming Israelis at the same time as striking Palestinian militants”.

It is crucial, as Winstanley suggests, that the media debate includes nuance. Because the propaganda around the events on 7 October helped to manufacture consent both at home and abroad for Israel’s genocidal attack on occupied Gaza that has killed at least 16,765 children in the last year. Highlighting Israel’s use of the Hannibal Directive on its own people on that day helps to set the record straight. And it helps to bring nuance back into a discussion full of hateful disinformation.

Featured image via the Canary

By Ed Sykes

This post was originally published on Canary.