Hamas-Israel war: What really happened on 7 October?

Infographic: TBS

On 18 November, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz said that a police investigation found that "[Israeli] military helicopters that fired at terrorists apparently also hit some revellers" on 7 October. By 'revellers' the newspaper was referring to attendees of the Re'im Music festival where at least 364 were killed during the Hamas attack.

Earlier, on 27 October, Max Blumenthal, editor of controversial independent American news website The Grayzone, published an investigative report where he suggested Israel Defence Forces (IDF) were also responsible for killing many Israeli civilians in crossfire, or in the process of indiscriminately killing Hamas gunmen, contributing to the overall death count on 7 October. 

The report was based on "piecing together" testimonies of Israeli Apache helicopter pilots and Israeli survivors along with an analysis of photos from the 7 October sites. The photos include kibbutz houses and scenes, including parked cars at the music festival. 

As of this writing, the Israeli death toll on 7 October stands at 1,200 — which was lowered from 1,400 after revision by Israeli authorities earlier in November. Palestinian death tolls amount to at least 20,000 since 7 October, according to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. This figure includes those trapped under the rubble.

After nearly two months since the 7 October carnage, many things still remain to be investigated about the day that sparked the war. Moreover, a kind of discourse that is causing a further divide among people over the Israel-Hamas conflict is the idea that Israel is also responsible for the high death toll on that fateful Saturday. The 18 November Haaretz report perhaps works as a confirmation.

That being said, the response of the Israeli government to the 7 October attack has been established as disproportionate and amounting to war crimes; Gaza, an enclave of 2.2 million Palestinians, was carpet-bombed for weeks on end and also cut off from water, food and medicine following the 7 October attack.

Israel's "retaliation" has been supported by its Western allies unequivocally and it was the Saturday event and its 'gruesome' details that kept their support for Israel steadfast. It also created an environment of high tension that paved the way for genocidal declarations by Israel to "take out Hamas," "flatten Gaza," etc. 

The details of the 7 October massacre committed by Hamas was used again and again to recharge the fervour, and in many cases reignite the violent sentiment to kill Palestinians as punishment for the crimes committed by Hamas.

So it is imperative to look back to what started it all. The details, used so fervently by so many across the board — from Israel to Washington to the EU and others — to justify Israel's military campaign throughout October, could be telling.

Following the crumbs

Recently, Blumenthal's interview with Chris Hedges — former foreign correspondent at The New York Times for 15 years covering the Middle East — was published on the latter's YouTube channel 'The Real News Network', which tends to give space to dissidents and where Blumenthal's 27 October report was discussed at length. 

One point stood out: the photos of the parked cars at the music festival that were heavily damaged, the charred bodies of victims and the burnt down kibbutz houses all looked eerily similar to scenes in Gaza after an Israeli air strike. It is the kind of damage that is wrought by Apache helicopters and not gunmen carrying AK47s. Israel of course used Apache helicopters that day to fire at the Hamas attackers. 

In the report, Blumenthal also wrote about Israel's UN ambassador Gilad Erdan's 26 October UN appearance. Erdan stood at the podium and held up a paper displaying a QR code captioned, "Scan to see Hamas' atrocities" while he said "we are fighting animals." Blumenthal wrote, "when I scanned I found around eight grisly images of burned bodies and blackened body parts." The damage to the human body was akin to the impact of Hellfire missiles seen in the past and elsewhere. This, Blumenthal said to Chris Hedges, was later deleted. 

Was the Hannibal Directive used on October 7?

Yehuda Shaul, a former Israeli infantry combat soldier, told Al Jazeera recently that the IDF are instructed to "open fire without constraints, in order to prevent the abduction", adding that the use of force is carried out even at the risk of killing a captive soldier.

Shaul, now a co-founder of the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence — the first such organisation of Israeli military veterans calling for an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip — explained how there wasn't any written directive, but it was shared with him and others orally, and is known as the Hannibal Directive. 

The Hannibal Directive asserts that in addition to firing at the abductors, soldiers can fire at junctions, roads, highways and other pathways opponents may take a kidnapped soldier through, reports Al Jazeera. 

Israel last invoked it in 2014 during the war on Gaza, according to leaked military audio recordings, though the army denied it had used the doctrine. Dozens of Palestinians were killed in the Israeli bombardment that followed, sparking accusations of war crimes against the Israeli army. 

The Al Jazeera report further adds that analysts now believe the Hannibal Directive was used on 7 October. 

Anadolu Ajansi also pointed to an interview with the daily Haaretz in which Lt Col Nof Erez drew attention to the possibility that Israeli forces responding to Hamas' attack might have implemented the directive.

A 2014 New Yorker article "Hadar Goldin and the Hannibal Directive" explained Israel's track record of using the directive and "military ethos" which "means 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)."

The directive essentially signals "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."

The intent is not to oversimplify, but to understand the mind mechanics that would lead Israeli military personnel to fire upon its own soldiers to escape captivity. If there is a long-standing rhetoric that "a dead soldier is better than a captive one," are we to understand the same can be implemented in relation to Israeli civilians?