What the Israeli killing machine, officially called the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), never openly discusses is what is known as the “Hannibal Directive”, which gives its members the right to kill Israeli citizens, particularly serving IDF members, if feared that they might fall as prisoners. The current Israeli National Security Minister, Ben Gvir, is calling for the same policy to be applied to members of the Israeli public, allowing them to carry arms and to shoot on sight any Palestinian civilian suspected of being a “terrorist”. He refers to this as a precautionary procedure, not as the Hannibal Directive, of course.
Many sources concur that the Hannibal Directive was first introduced as part of IDF’s operational order or code of conduct, back in 1986. Four years earlier, during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Ahmed Jibril’s Popular Front For the Liberation of Palestine, General Command, captured three Israeli soldiers who, in 1985, were exchanged for 1,150 Palestinian prisoners, including the late Sheik Ahmed Yassin, founder of Hamas. That swap deal was highly costly for Israel, forcing the IDF to adopt the secret Hannibal Directive.
The Directive, a secret standing order, has never been written down in its entirety, but almost all IDF members, particularly the Air Force fighter pilots, know about it and are compelled to use it to prevent a fellow soldier from falling into the hands of irregular fighting groups, like Hamas, for example.
The Hannibal Directive, which the IDF denies ever existed, says that it is better a dead civilian hostage or soldier than to be taken alive because, in the latter case, getting that person back will be very expensive once hostilities end and negotiations start.
In practice, this means that Israeli forces have the all-clear to kill their own people if they believe they are going to be taken alive by the other side. Shaul Mofaz, who was Chief of Israeli military staff, in 1999, explained the policy by saying that “With all the pain that saying this entails, an abducted soldier, in contrast to a soldier who has been killed, is a national problem.”
In the wake of Hamas’s 7 October attack, resulting in the death of 1,139 Israelis and foreigners, including soldiers, and the capture of some 240 individuals, among them soldiers and security personnel, the IDF is thought to have reactivated the Hannibal Directive.
