Hasbara and the Hannibal Directive: Problems with Israel’s Explanation of the Hamas Attack on October 7
Did Israel kill more Israelis than Hamas on 10/7? How many babies died? Why didn’t Israel collect evidence of rape?
“[Hitler’s] primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.” — Walter C. Langer for the United States Office of Strategic Services
Zionists say hasbara just means explaining their side. They don’t expect us to complete the thought: a partisan explanation is propaganda. All cultists believe the ends justify the means, so they never ask what it means if their truth is built on lies.
Hasbara is as old as Zionism. Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, did not coin the word — one of his followers, Nahum Sokolow, did — but Herzl knew his dream of an ethnically-cleansed Jewish homeland would be rejected by Jews who wanted to live elsewhere and Jews who cared for all of the poor and the working class, so he told his followers, “engage in propaganda.”
Early Zionist hasbara includes two claims by the first colonists, that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land” and that Jewish settlers “made the desert bloom” — in Herzl’s day, Palestine had half a million inhabitants, and its land had been famously rich for thousands of years. I addressed some hasbara in Israel, the Cosplay Nation. Now I’ll look at the major problems with hasbara about Hamas’s attack on October 7.
But before I do, you should know about a secret protected by Israeli military censorship until 2003, the Hannibal Directive. Created in 1986 in reaction to the capture of IDf soldiers, the directive holds that
“the kidnapping must be stopped by all means, even at the price of striking and harming our own forces.”
One theory is the directive’s name refers to Hannibal killing himself before Romans could take him. The problem with this theory is captured IDF members were not given a choice. Their comrades were supposed to stop them from being taken alive, even if that meant killing them.
In theory, the Hannibal Directive only applied to soldiers. It was officially revoked in 2016, but like many officially revoked policies, it lives on. On October 7, 2023, that unspoken policy had disastrous consequences.
1: Who killed the most Israelis, Hamas or Israel?
Asa Winstanley provides a summary from Israeli sources of what the current hasbara tries to hide:
At midday on 7 October Israel’s supreme military command ordered all units to prevent the capture of Israeli citizens “at any cost” — even by firing on them.
The military “instructed all its fighting units to perform the Hannibal Directive in practice, although it did so without stating that name explicitly,” Israeli journalists revealed last weekend.
The revelations came in a new investigative article by Ronen Bergman and Yoav Zitun, two journalists with extensive sources inside Israel’s military and intelligence establishment.
They also revealed that “some 70 vehicles” driven by Palestinian fighters returning to Gaza were blown up by Israeli helicopter gunships, drones or tanks.
Many of these vehicles contained Israeli captives.
The journalists wrote that “it is not clear at this stage how many of the captives were killed due to the operation of this order” to the air force that they should prevent return to Gaza at all costs.
We may never know if Hamas or Israel killed more Israelis that day, but it’s likely Israel did. William Van Wagenen writes,
An Israeli police investigation reported by Haaretz indicates that Hamas was unaware of the festival in advance. The official findings suggest that the intended target was Re’im, a settlement and military base located just down the road — on Route 232 — from the Nova site.
A major fight did indeed take place at Re’im, home to the Israeli army’s Gaza Division, the Palestinian resistance’s stated military target. The commander of the base was forced to call in airstrikes from an Apache helicopter on the base itself just to repel the Hamas attack.
The police investigation also indicates that Hamas fighters reached the festival site from Route 232, rather than from the Gaza border fence, further supporting the claim that the festival was not a planned target.
…as people exited the festival site by car and moved onto Route 232, Israeli police established roadblocks in both directions, leading to a traffic jam that trapped many partygoers in the area where fighting between Hamas and the Border Police would eventually break out.
…When gunfire erupted, those trapped on the road fled east into open fields, whether in their cars or by foot. Many made it past the fields and hid near trees, under bushes, and in ravines.
But body cam footage shows heavily armed Israeli police units taking up positions on the road and firing across the open field into the trees where civilians had taken cover.
…Israeli officials claim it was Hamas fighters who destroyed hundreds of cars at Nova, burning their passengers alive. But Hamas did not have this kind of firepower.
The group’s fighters were armed only with light machine guns and RPGs, and their ammunition was limited to what they could bring with them in pick-up trucks from Gaza.
Guardian journalist Owen Jones noted this while discussing a 43-minute compilation of video footage from 7 October shown to select journalists by the Israeli army. He says Hamas fighters “urge bullets to be saved for killing soldiers. One terrified reveler in a car is asked, ‘Are you a soldier?’”
As Jones notes: “So there is clearly some distinction being made between civilians and soldiers in the footage selected by Israel of the thousands of hours of footage which we don’t see.”
While Hamas’ ammunition was limited, the Border Police were heavily armed and Apache helicopters are equipped with Hellfire missiles and 30 mm automatic chain guns, which can hold up to 1,200 rounds of ammunition and fire 625 rounds a minute.
This suggests Israeli forces caused most of the death and destruction at Nova — which could be confirmed If Israel were to release all of its video footage from 7 October.
2: Were babies beheaded and baked alive?
Wikipedia’s Misinformation in the Israel–Hamas war notes (with a link to their source),
“According to Bituah Leumi, Israel’s national social security agency, of the 46 civilians that were killed in Kfar Aza, the youngest was 14 years old, meaning that no babies were killed at Kfar Aza.[32]”
…In a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition on 28 October, Eli Beer, founder of an Israeli EMS organization, claimed that Hamas had burned a baby alive in an oven. The claim was repeated by journalist Dovid Efune, commentator John Podhoretz and others, in tweets seen over 10 million times. Israeli journalists and police found no evidence for the claim, and a representative of ZAKA, a first responder organization, said the claim was “false”.[33][34][35]
3: Did Hamas members commit systematic mass rape?
Kareena Pannu writes,
Israel has repeatedly failed to provide forensic evidence, concrete photographic evidence, or victim testimonies to news organizations beyond inferences made by Israel’s forensic teams. Indeed, the Times of Israel alleges that the IOF will never provide forensic evidence because “physical evidence of sexual assault was not collected from corpses by Israel’s overtaxed morgue facilities,” and it is now, reportedly, too late to collect conclusive evidence.
Presently, Israel’s case consists of one eyewitness testimony shown privately to journalists by the Israeli police, witness testimonies of “body collectors,” forensic teams, and army staff, photographs taken at sites that suggest women may have been sexually assaulted, and witness testimonies of Hamas fighters acquired from Shin Bet, whose use of torture is notorious. Testimonies of victims will not be shared; the police have not interviewed any surviving victims, and according to May Golan, Israel’s Women’s Empowerment Minister, the very few victims who survived are receiving psychiatric treatment and are therefore, conveniently, unable to talk.
…Furthermore, despite calling on the UN to condemn Hamas’s acts of sexual violence, Israel refuses to cooperate with a UN commission of inquiry into sexual violence committed by Hamas on the ludicrous basis that the UN has “an anti-Israel bias.”
The easiest reports to verify about Hamas and rape do not fit the hasbara. A freed Hamas captive, Mia Schem, said she was afraid she would be raped, but she was not, and Bethan McKernan mentioned an attempted rape that a Hamas fighter prevented:
Lt Tamar Bar Shimon, who survived the attack at the Erez military base attached to the Gaza Strip’s only civilian crossing into Israel, has testified that a Hamas man tried to take her clothes off, another stopped him, and they left the room in which she was hiding.
One thing we do know: ZAKA is not a trustworthy source for allegations of sexual violence on October 7:
ZAKA is a non-governmental religious Haredi organization specializing in collecting dead bodies and body parts from sites of “unnatural” deaths and transporting them to morgues according to strict Jewish religious laws.
The organization was founded in the late 1990s by Yehuda Meshi-Zahav. Meshi-Zahav was previously the leader of “Keshet,” an ultra-Orthodox Jewish terrorist group that targeted forensic pathologists and used explosives against shops selling “secular newspapers.” Meshi-Zahav led ZAKA until 2021, when he attempted suicide after shocking revelations of dozens of rape and sexual assault cases committed by him. Since its inception, the organization — described as a “militia” by the highly esteemed Israeli journalist Yigal Sarna — has been subject to incessant criticism, investigations, and demands to dismantle it.
The testimonies provided by ZAKA’s members — all men, most of whom are volunteers — on sexual violence on October 7 are based on their interpretation of what they claim to have seen on bodies they collected after the attack. Not only do these men lack the professional qualifications to make such assessments (they are not medical experts), but their testimonies also lack details: no age, no location, and no time. Details and/or evidence have not even been given to journalists who have asked to see them while reporting on these testimonies. This means that it is impossible to either confirm or debunk them.
Of course, these problems do not mean no one was raped during the attacks. Even if Hamas fighters did not rape because their objective was to commit military damage and take hostages, some of the mob of looters and opportunists who followed them through the fence may have committed rape. Tragically, the people who would best be able to answer many of the questions are dying while the conflict continues. Hamas said 60 hostages were killed in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza Strip, and three Israeli hostages tried to save themselves, only to be killed by their own military.
If you wish to dig further into this, see:
- CNN report claiming sexual violence on October 7 relied on non-credible witnesses, some with undisclosed ties to Israeli govt
- Owen Jones’ reaction to the heavily-edited video that Israel put together.
- Scandal-stained Israeli ‘rescue’ group fuels October 7 fabrications
4: Is Hamas willing to accept a two-state solution?
Israel has repeatedly rejected Hamas truce offers since 1988. In 2017, Hamas revised its original charter in ways that would allow for a two-state solution, but Israel ignored that opportunity for peace too.
5: How trustworthy are the numbers of dead and wounded provided by the Ministry of Health in Gaza?
P.S.
A New York Times story claiming a pattern of gender-based violence on October 7 hinged on the story of Gal Abdush. But the Abdush family says there is no proof she was raped, and that Times reporters interviewed them under false pretenses.
Interesting interview with 10/7 survivor Raz Cohen, who gave the NYT the quote “screams without words,” for its headline: “‘Screams Without Words:’ How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence On Oct. 7.” He just told Tapper the men he saw were not actually from Hamas, but rather Gazan civilians who came through the fence after the IDF collapsed. The number of non-Hamas people who came through has complicated efforts to figure out what happened that day, and has even made it difficult to know who is holding all the hostages. (That doesn’t make his allegation any less serious, but that makes for an awkward headline on a significant piece of journalism.)
PS #2
Israel’s apologists sometimes link to MEMRI’s The Hamas Atrocities Documentation Center (HADC). MEMRI is officially rated a Questionable source by Media Bias Factcheck:
“Overall, we rate MEMRI a Questionable source based on the promotion of Israeli propaganda, poor sourcing, and a few failed fact checks.”
Wikipedia has more examples of MEMRI’s flaws.
