What actually happened on October 7th? Israel deployed the Hannibal directive, mass killing its own people
The order was to stop “at all costs any attempt by Hamas terrorists to return to Gaza, that is, despite the fear that some of them have abductees”.
In the early morning of October 7th, while most of the kibbutzim around the Gaza Strip were still asleep, Palestinian resistance troops launched (what few military analysts would call anything but) an impressive military offensive.
In a couple of minutes, they charged with vehicles, vessels and aircraft on four military bases that surround the border: Zikim, Re'im, Nahal Oz and Erez. The Israeli soldiers were few and sleepy on this festive day, Shemini Atzeret. The barrage of fire forced most of them to retreat and hide. The Arab commandos met practically no resistance.
In parallel, thousands of missiles sent from Gaza scattered throughout Israeli territory; including Jerusalem. A message appeared on the cell phones of the residents of nearby kibbutzim (mostly established for the purpose of housing military personnel): "Lock yourself in your shelters, there are terrorists nearby." Soon after that the electricity was cut off, without which it is impossible to close the metal fence of the settlements.
The Palestinians have previously neutralized automatic machine guns and surveillance antennas lining the Gaza fence, using explosives dropped from small, slow-flying drones that are difficult to detect. Within minutes, the Israeli army was deafened and blinded at one of its most dangerous points.
Although on duty, Israel's elite infantry units - the 13th and 51st Battalions of the Golan Brigade - were inadequate to defend against such a well-coordinated assault. The Hamas and PIJ members soon overpowered them, after which the killings began. It included at least a couple dozen of horrific crimes, some of them caught on camera.
The militants killed 1,154 people and took 240 hostages in what is often referred to as “the biggest massacre of Jews since WW2”. This, however, is not true as the biggest one actually happened during the Dirty War in Argentina, when between 1,900 and 3,000 Jews were killed. It may also be worth noting that the country supplying arms to the fascists in Buenos Aires was - Israel.
Among the victims are 256 soldiers, 53 police and security forces and 63 civilian security guards. The remaining 782 are unarmed civilians. It is confirmed that at least 18 were killed by Israeli armed troops and several bodies found under the rubble died in unclear circumstances.
And while the bodies were still being dug up, along rose some suspicious stories. “Two piles of 10 children were tied to the back, burned to death“, Yossi Landau, head of operations of a "disaster victim identification" organization called ZAKA, told Sky News, standing in front of a house in kibbutz Be’eri. Benjamin Netanyahu later repeated the same on a phone call with Joe Biden.
Only two 12-year-old twins - Liel and Yanai Hetrzroni - were killed in Be’eri; no other children. Later Landau told Al Jazeera that he confused 20 year-olds with children.
Landau was also personally responsible for "confirming" the false story about the beheading of 40 babies, since he said that he "saw with his own eyes children and babies whose heads were beheaded".
Only one baby (a child up to three years old) - 10-month-old Mila Cohen - was among those killed in the October 7th attack. Also, there are a total of 36 minors on the victims list.
But Landau was just getting warmed up. In an October 12th interview he stated - as tears poured down his face - that upon entering a house in Be’eri "we see a pregnant lady lying on the floor, and then we turn her around and see that the stomach is cut open, wide open. The unborn baby, still connected with an umbilical cord, was stabbed with a knife. And the mother was shot in the head. And you use your imagination, trying to figure out what came first.”
Landau appears to have based this testimony on a rumor spread online by an anonymous military source two days earlier. According to this, the allegedly pregnant victim was 30 years old, which was enough to discredit this story as the only female victims recorded in or around Beeri were 44-year-old Rinat Segev Even and 22-year-old Tair Bira; and none of them were pregnant. Moreover, not a single pregnant woman was recorded among those killed on October 7.
Kibbutz Beeri also indirectly denied Landau's claims, stating that "the story about the pregnant woman reported by ZAKA is not relevant to Beeri," while Israeli police reported that they had no record of the incident. When asked about it, Landau offered to provide the journalist with a picture from his mobile phone.
The photo provided shows an unidentifiable piece of charred flesh.
However, the Israeli army's official social media account claimed to have photos of the crime that it could not post due to concerns that they might violate X's terms of use. So far, as far as is known, the alleged photos have not been recorded on any forum.
In a desperate attempt to corroborate Landau's false allegations, an Israeli social media user created a video combining the testimony of a ZAKA volunteer with footage of a Mexican drug cartel torturing a prisoner to death. The video soon went viral and even attracted the attention of the wife of Israeli President Isaac Herzog. The first lady even wrote that "Hamas video from a kibbutz shows terrorists torturing a pregnant woman and removing her fetus."
Bibi's wife Sarah Netanyahu had a similar gaffe, sending a letter to the American first lady Jill Biden about the pregnant hostage who gave birth in Gaza. Israel's Haaretz exposed it as a lie. The hostage in question, Natwari Mulkan, was released in a hostage exchange and was not pregnant.
Also, Landau's colleague at ZAKA, Simcha Dizingoff, threw out several highly dubious stories of his own. For instance, he claims to have seen "one child, about six years old, killed with a knife stuck in his skull." However, the official record of deaths from Kfar Aza shows that no child under the age of 14 was killed in the kibbutz.
Interestingly, Landau also stated that anyone who questions his version of the events of October 7 - "should be killed."
One of Landau's stories was reproduced by Antony Blinken during a Senate hearing on October 31st on the situation in Gaza, as a rationale for rejecting the ceasefire. "A boy and a girl, six and eight, and their parents are at the breakfast table. The father's eye gouged out, the mother's breast cut off, the girl's foot amputated, the boy's fingers cut off before they were executed, and then their executioners sat down and had a meal. That is what this society is dealing with", the American evoked.
Despite the presence of several potential witnesses inside Be’eri, there is no independent testimony to corroborate these claims. And what further discredits these allegations is the fact that in this kibbutz no deaths of brothers and sisters between the ages of about six and eight were recorded. Eitan and Alin Kapshitter - who were five and eight years old - come the closest to this description. But they were not killed in a house, but in a car when their parents mistakenly drove into the crossfire of Israeli and Hamas forces.
In December Netanyahu thanked ZAKA volunteers, saying: “We need to buy time, which we gain by turning to world leaders and to public opinion. You have an important role in influencing public opinion, which also influences leaders.“
As for the slaughter that took place following the Hamas breakthrough, it is obvious that Palestinian fighters are responsible for a large number of these casualties. However, a considerable number of testimonies and other evidentiary materials shed a slightly different light on the commonly propagated narrative.
Tuval Escapa, a member of the security team for Be'eri, established a hotline during the crisis to coordinate between the residents of the kibbutz and the Israeli army. As the situation was chaotic at one point, Escapa recalls, "commanders on the ground made difficult decisions - including shelling houses with their occupants to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages".
At the same time as they were "shelling the houses" of their citizens, the Israeli army was "forced to request an airstrike" on its own facility inside the Erez crossing to Gaza "to repel the terrorists" who had taken control, reports Haaretz. The base at the time was filled with officers and soldiers of the Israeli Civil Administration.
These reports suggest that orders to attack homes and surrounding areas inside Israel - even at the cost of many Israeli lives - came from the military high command.
According to Yasmin Porat, who was taken hostage by Hamas fighters, the army "undoubtedly" killed numerous Israeli non-combatants during armed clashes on October 7th; including her partner. "They eliminated everything, including the hostages," she said, referring to Israeli special forces. The Israeli described "very, very strong crossfire" and Israeli tank shelling, which led to many casualties among Israelis.
While in the hands of Hamas attackers, Porat recalled: "They did not abuse us. They treated us very humanely... No one treated us violently. I was calm because I knew nothing would happen to me." She added: "The goal was to abduct us to Gaza, not to kill us."
That Israel bombarded its citizens with tank rockets is also proven by the testimony of the only survivor from Beeri, Hadas Dagan, whose wife Adi was killed in the process: "Terrorists started running away ... Bullets started entering the house from all directions. I hear the children (op .a. Liel and Yanaija) screaming: 'Please help us!' Suddenly a terrible 'boom!' and I can't move my legs ... It was clear to me that it was a tank ... and I saw a hole in Adi's main artery. I try to stop the blood flowing with my finger. What else could I do? He moved for a few moments, and then he didn't move anymore ... I'm in a pool of blood ... and I simply hug him again. I hear another crash from outside. And then I don't hear anything anymore. I'm waiting for my bullet to arrive."
Porat also stated that the twins - along with 11 other noncombatants - were most likely killed by IDF tank shelling. "The girl didn't stop screaming all those hours ... but when the two (tank) shells hit, she stopped screaming. Then there was silence," she recalled.
This attack was ordered by an Israeli brigadier general Barak Hiram, who told the tank commander: “The negotiations are over. Break in, even at the cost of civilian casualties.”
However, this is not how Hiram initially described events in Be’eri. On the contrary, he portrayed himself as a rescuer of civilian hostages. “I authorize the YAMAM force commander there to burst inside and to try to save the citizens trapped in those buildings … I think in that block there were about 20 citizens and I think the YAMAM force managed to save about four of them. All the rest were murdered in cold blood. And there we found eight children tied together and shot, a couple, husband and wife, tied together and shot”, the brigadier general lied.
Before Hiram later publicly acknowledged this mass murder, he explained the logic of it: “I am very afraid that if we return to Sorana (Israeli military headquarters in Tel Aviv) and try to hold all kinds of negotiations, we may fall into a trap that will tie our hands and not allow us to do what is required, which is to go in, manipulate, and kill them (Hamas).”
As a reporter for the Israeli I24 - a media close to Netanyahu - noted during a visit to Be'eri, "small and unusual houses (were) bombed or destroyed" and "well-kept lawns (were) torn up by the tracks of an armored vehicle, possibly a tank." Many bodies were found under these ruins.
According to Haaretz, during the operation to regain control of this settlement, the Israeli army "shelled the homes of Israelis who have been taken captive," and "the price was terrible: at least 112 Be’eri residents were killed."
A commander of the Israeli army, Golan Vach, while touring one of the attacked kibbutzim with journalists, stopped in front of a destroyed house and said that Hamas killed 15 people in it - including eight babies - and then burned them. Besides the fact that "only" one baby was killed that day, what is even more strange about this story is that, according to Vach, the militants stayed in the burned house and were met there by the IDF who "attacked them with tanks" because "they were supposed to conquer the whole settlement". So, a tank demolished a house in which, according to this story, there were 15 Israelis, whom the army could not have known were dead.
An Israeli tank driver also confirms that when she broke through the kibbutz fence, the soldier told her, pointing towards the houses: "There are terrorists there, shoot!" "I asked him if there were civilians there. He said, 'I don't know, just shoot!'", she recalled. However, she did not decide on a cannon strike, but instead rained bullets from a machine gun towards the house. Her colleague added that "even though it was a complex situation" they "fired missiles" within the communities.
A security analyst Chris Cobb-Smith explained that Hamas was “only armed with light weapons” and that the destruction in Be’eri was “clearly not caused by a structural collapse from a fire”, but “by some sort of heavy weapon system during combat”, “most probably a tank”.
And besides tanks, helicopters also descended on the kibbutz. “An IDF helicopter fires into an Israeli kibbutz. And then you see a tank … fires a shell into a house. These are thongs that you cannot comprehend. And then I suddenly see, on the right side, hundreds of people from the kibbutz … A war zone”, recounted Erez Tidhar from the Rescue and Evacuation Unit.
The squadron commander explained how he almost attacked the house of an Israeli family that had been taken over by Hamas militants. With his family inside the home, the pilot "decided to fire a cannonball 30 meters from the house, which was a very difficult decision." "I am shooting so that if they are there right now, they hear the bombs inside the house so that they understand that it is known that they are there and with the hope that they will leave that house. And, to tell you the truth, it crossed my mind to shoot around the house," he admitted.
Soon, "Apache pilots realized that they had to jump over all the restrictions" so "some of them started to shoot terrorists by themselves, without the permission of their superiors". In the process, Hellfire missiles destroyed several houses and burned about a hundred cars, inside which people were burned alive.
Israeli government spokesperson Mark Regev recounted that, although it was originally stated that on October 7th there were 1,400 Israeli casualties, the number has been revised because: “There were actually bodies that were so badly burnt we thought they were ours, in the end apparently they were Hamas terrorists.”
A report on the Apache squadrons stated that "the pilots realized that there was enormous difficulty in distinguishing ... who was a terrorist and who was a soldier or a civilian". Therefore "the rate of fire against thousands of terrorists was at first enormous, and only at a certain point the pilots began to slow down their attacks and select their targets carefully."
In an interview with the Israeli Mako, the pilot of one such Apache referred to the painful dilemma of whether to shoot at cars returning to Gaza. He knew that there might be Israeli prisoners in many of those vehicles, but he decided to shoot anyway. "I choose such targets where I tell myself that there is a small chance that I will shoot at the hostages here as well," he said, admitting that his judgment "was not 100 percent." His colleague also recalled the difficulty of the task: "I found myself in a dilemma as to what to shoot at, because there are so many of them."
There is also footage that the Times of Israel describes by saying: "The video shows missiles hitting cars, trucks, motorcycles and people walking, while the pilot reports hundreds of gunmen rushing into Israel to attack nearby communities."
The police investigation also found that the military helicopter, which fired on Hamas at the Nova festival, "allegedly hit some festival participants as well." However, the shooting didn’t come just from the sky. "We drove into the field and tried to hide from them (Hamas)… Afterwards, we got a bit deeper into the fields and then they (IDF) started firing sniper rifles on us from different places and also heavy artillery", the festival attendee and a former Israeli soldier Gilad Karplus told the BBC.
Germany’s Bild reported the testimony of Maya P., who survived the festival. The paper writes that “the terrorists who set up the road blockades came disguised as police officers and soldiers.” “People ran into them hoping to be rescued, and then they were executed,” Maya said, crying. However, an Israeli police investigation reported by Haaretz indicates that Hamas was unaware of the festival in advance, which brings into question the alleged militants’ disguises.
A Times of Israel journalist who visited the site days later recounted that “dozens of cars were parked in rows, some of them burnt husks containing charred bodies of young festival-goers who were shot and burned alive.” The Palestinians did not have the kind of firepower to do this.
In the week following the attack, elite unit soldiers examined about 70 vehicles left in the area between the kibbutzim and the Gaza Strip. “These vehicles did not reach Gaza because they were hit by the gunfire of a combat helicopter, an anti-tank missile, or a tank, and in some cases, everyone in the car was killed,” a report said.
Israeli security forces also struck fleeing Israelis, whom they mistook for armed members of Hamas. Ashkelon resident Danielle Rachiel described how she was nearly killed after fleeing the Nova music festival when it was attacked by Gazan militants. "When we got to the roundabout (at the kibbutz), we saw Israeli security forces! We kept our heads down (because) we automatically knew we would be suspicious of them, in a small battered car ... from the same direction the terrorists were coming from. Our forces started shooting at us! Our windows were broken," recounted Rachiel. Only when they shouted in Hebrew, "We are Israelis!" did the shooting stop, and they were taken to safety.
Some Israelis were not as lucky as Rachiel. Adi Ohana was shot dead by Israeli police near his home after they mistook him for a Palestinian guerrilla. "An innocent man was killed in the most careless way possible," his niece complained.
As journalist Dan Cohen reported, the Israeli military killed Efrat Katz, age 68, as she was being taken from Kibbutz Nir Oz to Gaza on a cart pulled by a tractor on 7 October. Her daughter, Doron Katz-Asher, and two granddaughters, Raz, age 2, and Aviv, age 4, were also in the cart. Doron Katz-Asher later told Israel’s Channel 12 that the Israeli army opened fire on the tractor, injuring her two daughters and killing her mother, Efrat.
27 hostages were killed between the kibbutz and Gaza under unsolved circumstances.
The Israeli army deliberately targeting its compatriots is only in accordance with the national Hannibal directive. This military procedure was established in 1986., after the Jibril Agreement in which Israel exchanged 1150 Palestinian prisoners for three Israeli soldiers. After a sharp political backlash, the Israeli military created a secret field order to prevent future kidnappings. The proposed operation was named after a Carthaginian general who decided to poison himself rather than be held captive by the enemy.
A previous Haaretz investigation of the directive concluded that “from the point of view of the army, a dead soldier is better than a captive soldier who himself suffers and forces the state to release thousands of captives in order to obtain his release.”
The last confirmed application of Hannibal's directive occurred on August 1st, 2014. in Rafah, when Hamas fighters captured an Israeli officer, Lt. Hadar Goldin. Israel then fired more than 2000 bombs, missiles and grenades into the area, killing Goldin along with more than 100 Palestinian civilians.
But on October 7th, according to a Yedioth Ahronoth investigation, the Hannibal Directive - which has previously only applied to army captives - was issued against Israeli civilians as well. The newspaper writes that "at noon on October 7, the IDF ordered all of its combat units in practice to use the ‘Hannibal Procedure’, although without clearly mentioning this explicitly by name”.
The order was to stop “at all costs any attempt by Hamas terrorists to return to Gaza, that is, despite the fear that some of them have abductees”.
This coincides with the testimony of Israeli reserve pilot Colonel Nof Erez. "We don't know if the hostages were hit when the gunboats and drones started firing when they saw mass traffic through the fence... But Hannibal's directive is deliberate ... What we saw was a massive Hannibal attack," Erez explained.
An apparent instance of this at the Nova festival was inadvertently documented by the BBC, which reported that video footage showed a woman who was taken hostage, but who: “Suddenly reappears two minutes later. She jumps and waves her arms in the air. She must think help is at hand - by this time, the Israeli Defence Forces had begun their efforts to repel the incursion. But seconds later she slumps to the floor as bullets bounce around her. We don't know if she survived.”
Also, the freed Israeli prisoners told Netanyahu's war cabinet how they had been deliberately attacked by Israeli helicopters on their way to Gaza, and how the Israeli army shelled them continuously while there. "We were sitting in the tunnels, we were terribly afraid that we would not be killed by Hamas, but by Israel. And then they would say - Hamas killed you," said kidnapped Menir Oz, upon his release.
“Since Monday, October 9th, the IDF shelled us. All the time shelling next to us. It is hard to explain to a couple of 4-year-old children that the one who is bombing them is the IDF. It is their own army that was supposed to protect them there, in their homes, where they instead abandoned them. Now it shells them while they are inside Gaza. And it continued, it didn’t stop … It does not make sense. They know I’m here, they know my children are here … And then in hindsight, I really understood, after I came back, that we’re not at all the priority of the Israeli government“, a former hostage told the press.
But they were a priority for someone else. “We did have the fear that they would get an order, that maybe eventually they’ll decide to kill us. And sometimes we would ask them that. They would tell us: ‘We will die before you do! We’ll die together!‘, very calmly, right? If we die, it’s because we’re here, with you“, a mother and daughter explained how the militants treated them, while another female captive said that “the terrorists protected them with their bodies from the army’s shelling“.
However, the Arab fighters were not able to protect all of the Israelis from the Israeli army. An outraged Israeli mom accused the IDF of deliberately killing her son while he was being held in a Gaza tunnel. Maayan Sherman wrote that her son Ron was “indeed murdered – not by Hamas,” but in circumstances more akin to “Auschwitz and the showers”. The killing of her son, she wrote, was caused “not from accidental gunfire, nor from crossfire, but from premeditated murder – bombing with poison gas.”
“Ron was kidnapped because of the criminal negligence of all the senior officials of the army and this damned government, who gave an order to eliminate him in order to settle a score with some terrorist from Jabalya,” she added. Sherman also questioned whether the same decision would have been taken “if Bibi’s son was there in the tunnel… or the grandson of (Israeli Defense Minister Yoav) Gallant?” Would they also be “poisoned with gas bombs,” she asked.
Following the murder, she installed a gravestone over her son’s final resting place, with an inscription that Sergeant Ron Sherman was “kidnapped, abandoned, and sacrificed in Gaza by the Israeli government”. It was quickly removed. “This is the government and this is the Ministry of Defense,” she concluded: “Cover-up, removal of blasphemous evidence, sacrificing the kidnapped, abandoning the bereaved parents.”
Mickey Rosenfeld, the longtime Israeli police spokesman who spread many lies about October 7th, in January finally acknowledged that lurid stories of babies hung on clotheslines, a fetus cut from a pregnant woman and a baby baked in an oven were invented “to increase the magnitude of hatred for Hamas”. Or, as Rosenfeld put it: “The war is not only military, not only political, it’s mainly media.”
The Israeli Channel 13 even managed to elicit a confession from the IDF spokesman, who apologized for “describing a reality that didn’t happen”. But, after “the hatred for Hamas“ allowed Gaza to be turned into a slaughterhouse, these are not just lies; they are genocide ammo.