To many readers, the Hannibal directive is a term that may not have been heard or read before. However, it is an important element in the events of 7 October 2023, and previous events.

It is named after Hannibal, the Carthaginian general (present-day Tunisia) who led forces against the Roman Republic during the Second Punic War (218 to 201 BC).

He assembled an army in Cartagena (modern Spain), and proceeded through Spain and France, in order to attack the Romans in Italy from the north. This involved crossing the Alps. He is famous for having done this with war elephants, along with 20,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry.

Israeli officials claim that the name Hannibal directive was a random computer-generated designation. However, Hannibal is said to have preferred suicide by poison to being taken prisoner by the Romans. This is the same intent of the Israeli Hannibal directive.

Background

Wikipedia notes that “During the 1982 Lebanon War, Palestinian forces imprisoned nine IDF soldiers as POWs. Six were held by Fatah (the main faction of the PLO) and three by the pro-Syrian PFLP-GC. In 1983, Israel agreed to free 4,700 Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners, including several high-ranking PLO officers, for the six IDF soldiers held captive by Fatah.

"The following year Israel agreed to free another 1,150 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. Many were allowed to remain in Israeli controlled territory.”

In 1986, after abductions of IDF soldiers in Lebanon and prisoner exchanges, the Hannibal directive was drawn up and made a policy of the IDF.

“The full text of the directive was never published, and until 2003, Israeli military censorship forbade any discussion of the subject in the press.”

The directive has undergone changes. The following version was quoted by Maariv, an Israeli newspaper, in 2014.
• During a kidnapping, the main task becomes to rescue our soldiers from the abductors, even at the cost of harming or injuring our soldiers.
• If the abductors and the kidnapped are identified and the calls are not heeded, a firearm must be fired in order to bring the kidnappers to the ground, or arrest them.
• If the vehicle or the hijackers do not stop, they should be fired at individually, intentionally, in order to hit the hijackers, even if it means harming our soldiers.

Israeli philosopher Asa Kasher, who wrote the IDF code of ethics, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that the original intent of the directive had been changed, and the IDF “interpreted it as if they are [meant] to intentionally, deliberately kill the soldier in order to foil the attempted abduction, and that was wrong."

IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot formally revoked the directive in 2016. However, the directive is still an unwritten and unspoken policy of the IDF.

And harming or injuring is a euphemism for killing. “Many testimonies from IDF soldiers … suggest that the IDF in practice adheres to the principle that a dead soldier is better than a captive soldier.”

7 October 2023

There have been widespread claims, many of them substantiated by eye-witness reports, that the Hannibal directive was employed during the Palestinian incursions of 7 October 2023.

The clearest was when Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that a command went out “Hannibal at Erez, dispatch a Zik." Erez is a border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel, while Zik is the nickname for the Hermes 450 unmanned aerial vehicle, an attack drone capable of firing four Rafael Spike missiles. Each one costs $2 million.

Equally clear is the testimony of hostages released in December 2023, who reported that they had been deliberately attacked by Israeli helicopters on their way into Gaza, and were shelled constantly by the Israeli military while they were there.

• "The IDF instructed all its fighting units in practice to follow the 'Hannibal Directive', although without clearly mentioning this explicit name. The instruction is to stop 'at all costs' any attempt by Hamas terrorists to return to Gaza, using language very similar to the original 'Hannibal Directive', despite repeated assurances by the security establishment that the procedure has been cancelled." (Investigative journalist Ronen Bergman in Yedioth Ahronot newspaper)

• "This was a mass Hannibal. It was tons and tons of openings in the fence, and thousands of people in every type of vehicle, some with hostages and some without." (Air Force Colonel Nof Erez)

• "The frequency of fire at the thousands of terrorists was enormous at the start, and only at a certain point did the pilots begin to slow their attacks and carefully choose the targets." (Yedioth Ahronot newspaper reporter Yoav Zeitoun)(Terrorists is standard Israeli terminology for Palestinians, whether combatants or civilians.)

• "Not a single vehicle can return to Gaza." (Israeli Gaza Division order)

• "There was no case in which a vehicle carrying kidnapped people was knowingly attacked, but you couldn't really know if there were any such people in a vehicle. I can't say there was a clear instruction, but everyone knew what it meant to not let any vehicles return to Gaza." (Israeli Southern Command source)

The IDF has neither confirmed nor denied whether the Hannibal directive was applied on 7 October.