Another Israeli soldier admits to implementing the ‘Hannibal Directive’ on October 7
Bar Zonshein appearing in a channel 13 exposé
Jonathan Ofir reports in Mondoweiss on 26 March 2024:
In Israeli military terminology, the so-called “Hannibal Directive” is the policy of firing upon one’s own soldiers to avert a prospective captive situation.
There is a growing amount of evidence and testimony that suggests that on October 7, the Hannibal Directive was implemented, at least to a certain extent, on Israelis. What’s more, growing testimonies indicate that this policy was extended to Israeli civilians in the form of indiscriminate fire from helicopters and tanks. The recent outstanding Al Jazeera investigation, “October 7,” addresses this question at considerable length.
Last week, another testimony involving such acts appeared on Channel 13 and was repeated a day later on Ynet, in which an armored company commander, Captain Bar Zonshein, tells of how he fired tank shells at vehicles driving towards Gaza near Kisufim — about 2 kilometers away from the Gaza perimeter fence.
“We identified two pickups driving Toyotas, and on them, there was a large number of people standing in the cabin, and there was a pile of people. I don’t know whether they were corpses or living people…And I decide to attack these vehicles,” Zonshein says.
One must point out that Zonshien’s description of a “pile” of people could either be military or civilians, but those distinctions apparently did not factor into his calculations. This is, of course, significant in Israeli terms because the Hannibal doctrine had hitherto only been limited to soldiers.