Ten days ago I published a post that helped break the news of the IDF's use of its so called “Hannibal Procedure” or "Hannibal Directive" where a captured Israeli Soldier who can't soon be freed by his comrades, is targeted for massive shelling and/or bombing to insure their death. All so Israel's political leaders won't have to deal with politically untidy loose ends like securing the release of Israel's captured soldiers.
IDF leveled Gaza neighborhood killing scores all to kill its captured soldier & his Hamas captor
Alshujaiya
Some commenters were outraged by the conclusions I drew from the reports I'd uncovered including an accusation that:
"Jesus. You are just making that up."
Well that wasn't the case. Now the IDF is looking into the incident as part of an official inquiry that will include use of the "Hannibal Directive" being carried out in Alshujaiya and in another instance in Rafah.
Report: IDF gears up for war crimes accusations, plans internal review of Gaza op
According to Israel Radio, the army will investigate some of the more notable events of the operation, including the Hamas attack on the armored personnel carrier which killed seven Israeli soldiers, the capture of infantry officer Hadar Goldin in Rafah and the subsequent use of the “Hannibal procedure” whereby the IDF uses increased firepower to prevent a situation in which one of its troops falls into the enemy’s captivity, and the Hamas attack on an army position in the southern Gaza Strip which killed five soldiers.
More from Ruth Margalit in the New Yorker:
Hadar Goldin and the Hannibal Directive
BY RUTH MARGALIT
Although the order specifies that only selective light-arms fire should be used in such cases, the message behind it is resounding. When a soldier has been abducted, not only are all targets legitimate—including, as we saw over the weekend, ambulances—but it’s permissible, and even implicitly advisable, for soldiers to fire on their own. For more than a decade, military censors blocked journalists from reporting on the protocol, apparently because they feared it would demoralize the Israeli public.
To be clear, there is no evidence that Goldin was killed by friendly fire. But military officials did confirm that commanders on the ground had activated the Hannibal Directive and ordered “massive fire”—not for the first time since Operation Protective Edge began, on July 8th. (One week into the ground offensive, in the central Gaza Strip, forces reportedly enacted the protocol when another soldier, Guy Levy, was believed missing.) Since the directive’s inception, the I.D.F. is known to have used it only a handful of times, including in the case of Gilad Shalit.
In essence, what this “military ethos” means is that Israel sanctifies the lives of its soldiers so much, and would be willing to pay such an exorbitant price for their release, that it will do everything in its power to prevent such a scenario—including putting those same soldiers’ lives at risk (not to mention wreaking havoc on the surrounding population). This is the dubious situation that Israel finds itself in: signalling to the military that a dead soldier is preferable to a captive one, while at the same time signalling to the Israeli public that no cost will be spared to secure a captured soldier’s release.
On Tuesday, as a seventy-two-hour ceasefire went into effect and the I.D.F. pulled its ground forces out of Gaza, I spoke to Assaf Sharon, the academic director of Molad, a progressive Israeli think tank that focusses on social policy. While he accepted Nisman’s logic, he questioned the Hannibal Directive’s social ramifications. “I don’t know that you can draft clear-cut rules that would apply to any situation, but I do think that a certain risk of a captured soldier’s life should be allowed. I think the real problem starts with the hysterical discourse, of the kind that says, ‘This must be stopped at any cost.’ From there, the path to the horrors we’ve seen over the last few days, in Rafah, is a short one. What we’ve seen wasn’t only putting a soldier’s life at risk but intentionally targeting anything that moved—whether relevant or irrelevant.”
The the Hannibal Directive is so wrong. Wrong for Israel's soldiers and their loved ones. Wrong for all the innocent bystanders and their loved ones.
New Post: How PM Sharon turned Israel's withdrawal from Gaza into an obstacle to peace & put Hamas in charge