Rafah, the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip, has emerged as one of the focal points of the ongoing Israeli genocide, which has, according to Al Jazeera, so far killed more than 37,000 Palestinians, including 15,000 children. A decade ago, when the Israeli military was last on the ground in Rafah, it offered a preview of the carnage to come. As Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture detail in their report “ ‘Black Friday’: Carnage in Rafah,” Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza killed 2,000 Palestinians—including up to 200 who were killed in a single four-day operation by the Israeli military in Rafah, which also led to the death of an Israeli soldier.
But rather than succumbing to an attack by Palestinian militants or even “friendly fire” mistakenly unleashed by fellow Israelis, the Israeli soldier was intentionally targeted by Israeli air strikes and ground forces implementing “the Hannibal Directive,” a top-secret military protocol encouraging them to kill their own troops, rather than allow captives to be taken alive.
“The order was devised by three senior army commanders in 1986,” Benny Brunner, a Dutch-Israeli documentarian whose films The Hannibal Directive and The H Protocol explore the subject, tells The Progressive. “The higher echelon of the army noticed that the politicians didn’t have the means to handle negotiating the release of an Israeli captive soldier. There were exchanges of a lot of Palestinian prisoners for one or two soldiers—sometimes it was just exchanging the body of a soldier. So they . . . decided, ‘We have to help the politicians, to prevent them facing the need to negotiate.’ ”
Brunner traces the origin of the Hannibal Directive, which also translates from Hebrew to “Hannibal Protocol,” to Israel’s invasion and occupation of Lebanon in the 1980s. Following the negotiated exchange of three Israeli soldiers captured by exiled Palestinian militants for 1,125 Palestinians imprisoned by the Israeli government, Israeli military officers devised the Hannibal Directive as a means of preventing such lopsided exchanges in the future. According to Brunner, “Hannibal” was used as a codeword for “kidnapped,” or “khatuf” in Hebrew.
The text of the Hannibal Directive has never been published, but testimony from Israeli military leaders and soldiers reveals two general interpretations: That it is a plan of action in the event of soldiers being taken captive by militants, meant to cut off predetermined points of exit, such as roads, bridges, and tunnels, thereby preventing militants from escaping the battlefield with the captives; or that it authorizes preventing soldiers from being taken captive by any means necessary, up to and including intentionally killing those soldiers. As Brunner explains, the Hannibal Directive has reportedly been revised four times, but its measures are still ambiguous.
The Hannibal Directive only became known to the public in the aftermath of the Israeli military’s previous ground operations in Rafah. On August 1, 2014—or “Black Friday,” as Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture dub it—militants with Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades ambushed three Israeli soldiers in Rafah, killing two and capturing one, with whom they retreated into a nearby tunnel. According to the “Black Friday” report, once the commanding Israeli officer learned of the missing soldier, he “announced the implementation of the Hannibal Directive over the radio, thus unleashing the operational directive that would determine the events of the days that followed.” Buildings and roads in the area were immediately and indiscriminately targeted by Israeli air and ground forces, who fired 1,000 bombs, missiles, and shells within the first three hours of a barrage that lasted on and off for four days. In addition to killing up to 200 Palestinian civilians, Israeli forces may also have killed the captive soldier, though Israel attributed the death to Hamas.
Following public outcry in Israel over the death of the soldier (although notably not the killings of the Palestinian civilians), the Israeli military said it was rescinding the Hannibal Directive in 2016. Brunner maintains, however, that “the spirit of Hannibal” is still in practice today. While the Israeli government denies that the Hannibal Directive was invoked by Israeli forces responding to attacks by Palestinian militants in Israel on October 7, Brunner points to widely reported instances of Israelis firing indiscriminately on militants and captives alike as proof that the protocol remains in practice, whether formally or informally. Similarly, the Hannibal Directive looms over the ongoing Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip, where Israeli forces have killed at least three captives outright and potentially caused the deaths of up to forty-three more through indiscriminate bombardments and blockades. Brunner even describes the entirety of Israeli society as being subjected to a kind of Hannibal Directive by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition government.
“This prime minister and this government of criminals, they are running a Hannibal Directive on the entire country,” says Brunner. “Netanyahu decided a long time ago that it’s OK to sacrifice these hostages for his own survival. In this sense, he is conducting a Hannibal Directive—not on the enemy, but on Israel itself.”
But Brunner also warns against confusing the Israeli opposition to Netanyahu with a genuine anti-war movement. While there are some Israelis who oppose both the current government and the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the majority think Israel’s military operations have “been about right” or have “not gone far enough.” Israeli society, as Brunner describes it, has already cut itself off from any point of exit from the battlefield, regardless of the potential for self-inflicted harm.
“All the Israelis who oppose Netanyahu—and they’re the majority now, since October 7—these people are pro-war,” he explains. “They want to continue the war. They want to replace him now, but not to stop the war. You have to understand this: There is no internal opposition to the war, no ‘Actually, let’s try to do it differently, let’s try to live in peace with [the Palestinians], let’s compromise.’ No, it doesn’t exist. It simply doesn’t exist.”