In the hours after Hamas broke through Gaza’s prison walls and launched its Al-Aqsa Flood operation on Oct. 7, 2023, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) deployed the “Hannibal Directive,” turning its weapons on the people it claims to defend. Hannibal, a military directive first developed in 1986, compels the IOF to fire upon any Israeli soldier at risk of capture, lest the resistance use captives as leverage to free the many thousands of Palestinian political prisoners, including women and children, who are held hostage and systematically tortured or abused in Israeli jails.
This leverage was precisely what the Flood hoped to obtain. But evidence of deployment of the Hannibal Directive fundamentally undermines the mainstream Western understanding of Al-Aqsa Flood, an understanding that has been shaped by Zionist propaganda and filtered through Western media. This narrative:
• Rests on stories of so-called Hamas atrocities, like the systemic mass rape fiction fabricated by The New York Times and ZAKA, the “40 beheaded babies” Hasbara propagated by Biden and amplified by mainstream media, and other fantastical yet disproven tales which are designed to evoke a racist caricature of the savage Palestinian.
• Portrays the Zionist regime as waging a righteous, if at times overzealous, war of self-defense authorized by the need to rescue hostages stolen by a terrorist group.
• Removes Al-Aqsa Flood from its historical context: the slow death, starvation, and siege imposed upon Gaza by the Zionist occupation and backed by the most powerful nations on earth.
The Hannibal Directive’s widespread use on Oct. 7 contradicts these supposed truisms and exposes Israel’s real aims.
The Zionist ethnostate is not waging a war to protect the lives of its settler-citizens, but rather with the clear intention of annihilating the Palestinian people. Even at the most basic level, the commonly cited death toll—1,139–hides the fact that many of these were casualties of the IOF. This oft-cited number also obscures that roughly a third of Israelis killed on Oct. 7 were soldiers or security forces—that is, legitimate targets as members of an occupation army according to accepted norms of international law. But more to the point, the implementation of the Hannibal Directive undercuts the claim that “freeing the hostages” was ever the aim of Israeli-American war crimes, supposedly conducted in self-defense. If the IOF itself drove up the death toll on Oct. 7, what Zionist propaganda calls the largest Jewish massacre since the Holocaust would be in part inflicted by Israel.
But even as Israeli outlets have reported extensively on Hannibal—outlets that are typically considered trustworthy by The New York Times—the “paper of record,” has maintained a convenient silence. That silence speaks volumes about the fragile consensus that maintains U.S. backing for Israel’s genocide. Here, we lay out the timeline of reporting on Oct. 7’s Hannibal Directive from Arab and Israeli media, and the parallel timeline of silence from The New York Times.
Palestinians were the first to recognize that the Hannibal Directive was being deployed. The martyred professor Refaat Alreer identified this pattern in real time, on Oct. 7. But Israeli media also quickly gathered proof.
By Oct. 15, just over a week after the attack, a compelling collection of evidence—testimonies from survivors and Israeli soldiers, statements by high-ranking IOF officials, and video released by the military—had already emerged. By the end of the month, there were numerous public accounts of Israeli forces firing bullets, tank shells, artillery and missiles on Israelis who had been taken hostage by Hamas and allied resistance factions like Palestinian Islamic Jihad. A report in Yedioth Ahronoth (YNET), one of the most widely-read papers in Israel, quoted a soldier who stated that IOF helicopters had “emptied their bellies” of missiles on all people and vehicles moving in the direction of the Gaza border fence. They continued:
“... the pilots realized that there was tremendous difficulty in distinguishing within the occupied outposts and settlements who was a terrorist and who was a soldier or civilian… The rate of fire against the thousands of terrorists was tremendous at first, and only at a certain point did the pilots begin to slow down the attacks and carefully select the targets.”
Other reports indicated that the IOF had fired on its own bases, which had been overrun by Al-Qassam in the initial stages of the attack. Prominent Israeli outlets, including YNET and Haaretz, printed these stories as domestic anger prompted by the IOF’s massive security failures reached a fever pitch.
By the end of October, it was well known that the IOF had killed some number of its citizens on Oct. 7—exact figures were difficult to determine due to the indiscriminate force of their counter-attack. In early January, New York Times staff writer Ronen Bergman, one of the world’s most well-sourced journalists within the Israeli military apparatus, published a Hebrew article in YNET, writing:
"The IDF instructed all its fighting units in practice to follow the 'Hannibal Directive', although without clearly mentioning this explicit name."
His story concluded that at least 70 vehicles bound for Gaza had been destroyed by Israeli forces, killing everyone inside.
In July, Haaretz published its own long-form investigation into the deployment of the Hannibal Directive on Oct. 7. It exposed the targeting of Israeli military bases by the IOF, along with the orders sent to the IOF’s Gaza Division:
“…the message conveyed at 11:22 A.M. across the Gaza Division network was understood by everyone. ‘Not a single vehicle can return to Gaza.’”
One military source said the instruction was designed to turn the border fence into a “killing zone.” The author continues:
“... the cumulative data indicates that many of the kidnapped people were at risk, exposed to Israeli gunfire, even if they were not the target.”
According to Haaretz, the Hannibal Directive was officially issued at the Nahal Oz outpost, Re’im army base, and Erez border crossing. Beyond even this reporting lies the “oral Torah,” an implicit understanding throughout the IOF that embraces the Hannibal Directive in the absence of a direct order.
The Times has wholly ignored this story, perhaps because it undermines the justification for war, avoiding the use of the word “Hannibal” altogether and choosing not to print the reporting of their own staff writer, Ronen Bergman. The sole exception to its dutiful ignorance came in mid-December. Promising to describe a “rampage that traumatized a nation,” the reporters quote IOF General Hiram, who was commanding troops when Palestinian fighters overran the village of Be’eri on Oct. 7. While instructing his soldiers to fire tank shells on a house where Hamas was holding Israeli hostages, Hiram told the Times he’d said: “Break in, even at the cost of civilian casualties.”
But neither this story nor the follow-up reporting placed General Hiram’s story within the context of the Hannibal Directive, which by mid-December had been widely reported in Israeli and Arab media. To a Times reader, it appeared as if the General made a heated and isolated decision to attack his own. The “paper of record” shielded the IOF from criticism by parroting its narrative that most of the Israeli hostages in that home and elsewhere were likely executed by Hamas fighters, a claim which has been directly refuted by survivors and eyewitnesses. One of the two survivors from the house in Be’eri spoke to Israeli radio on October 15, saying that the Hamas fighters holding them captive had not threatened them and were attempting to negotiate with Israeli forces. She was asked by the radio host: “So our forces may have shot them?” to which she replied: "Undoubtedly. They eliminated everyone [in the house], including the hostages."
Further Times stories bill themselves as revelations, while obfuscating the deployment of Hannibal and presenting debunked hasbara as fact. One mid-November article, written weeks after most of what we now know had been made public, titled “What We Know About the Death Toll in Israel From the Hamas-Led Attacks” does not mention the evidence that Israeli forces were responsible for some, if not many, of the deaths.
Just 8 days after his YNET report on Hannibal, Ronen Bergman co-authored a story with Jerusalem Bureau Chief Patrick Kingsley, “In Strategic Bind, Israel Weighs Freeing Hostages Against Destroying Hamas”. A responsible breakdown of this topic would surely include the revelations that Israel had already murdered its own soldiers and citizens, but it's completely absent from the report. In this context, Kingsley and Bergman still do not question the IOF’s infallibility–or their intentions. The authors maintain the facade of the Zionist state’s righteousness and the fiction that it respects the sanctity of hostages’ lives. In reality, the contradiction of sacrificing Israelis to “destroy” Hamas is not a contradiction at all in the Zionist imagination, if it advances their interests.
So why has The Times ignored and suppressed well-documented evidence of IOF killing Israelis on 10/7, while continuing to repeat debunked stories of mass rapes?
Because the narrative constructed around Oct. 7—a barbaric terror attack in which Hamas raped, murdered and kidnapped Jews simply because they are Jews—is the center of gravity upon which American propaganda for Israel’s genocidal war rests. The primary function of the imperialist media apparatus is to advance a narrative that serves them, despite its glaring contradictions. The New York Times faithfully fulfills that function when it comes to Israel.
For the IOF on Oct. 7, Israelis were better off dead than taken hostage, because as hostages they compelled the Israeli state to negotiate with the Palestinian resistance, the very memory of which the Zionist entity wishes to erase from the earth. That same narrative is reproduced at a larger scale today, a year after Oct. 7, 2023. The Zionist state has made it clear it prefers to escalate to regional warfare by assassinating resistance leaders like Ismail Haniyeh and Hassan Nasrallah, and expanding its fight on the Lebanese front by once again deploying the Dahiyeh Doctrine in Beirut, before it accepts a ceasefire agreement which would recognize the resistance as a counterpart. In the same breath as Israel tells its citizens that it is fighting for their lives, it draws Iran and Hezbollah into more lethal retaliation. In this sense, too, Israelis are better off dead in the eyes of their state’s increasingly impulsive and violent escalations than in a region redrawn after apocalyptic war, or, worse, a ceasefire on Palestinians’ terms.