The Hannibal Directive: How Israel Killed Its Own Troops (on purpose) and Massacred Palestinians to Prevent Soldier’s Capture by Max Blumenthal on Alternet.org September 2, 2014.

Click for Source Article by Max Blumenthal on AlterNet.org

Rafah in Gaza, Aug. 1, 2014 is known as Black Friday, the day the Israeli military bombarded the city with almost every mode of destruction available to it, from F-16 missiles to Apache rockets to naval shelling to drone strikes and mortars. + Bulldozers ripped down homes at random while tanks barreled through neighborhoods, shelling anything in sight. In a matter of hours, at least 500 artillery shells and hundreds of missiles were dumped on the city, almost entirely in civilian areas. By the end, 190+ people murdered, so many that unequipped local hospitals were forced to store their corpses and body parts in ice cream coolers.

Target in Rafah was NOT just civilians but Israeli army aimed to kill one of its own = Invoked the 1986 Hannibal Directive = An indiscriminate assault on the entire circumference of the area where one of its soldiers, Lt. Hadar Goldin, was allegedly taken captive by Hamas. = One of 3 instances Israel initiated the 1986 Hannibal Directive to prevent a politically painful prisoner swap by killing its own Hamas captured soldiers.

Israel established the Hannibal Directive in 1986 following the Jibril Agreement, a prisoner exchange in which Israel traded 1150 Palestinian prisoners for three Israeli soldiers. Amidst the political backlash, the Israeli military drafted a secret field procedure to prevent future kidnappings. Named after the Carthaginian general who chose to poison himself rather than be held captive by the enemy. Co-drafter of the doctrine were a Tel Aviv University professor and a Maj. Gen. = “It’s a military operation…Soldiers’ [lives] can be risked.”

Israeli army executed the Hannibal Directive targeted the area where Goldin was supposedly captured + Leveled massive firepower against a civilian population over large swaths of a densely populated city of 350,000. After the assault, USA White House wrongly blamed Hamas for violating the ceasefire, legitimizing another piece of Israeli disinformation and whitewashing the violence, while only a few Israeli public figures criticized the military’s behavior. = Very little fallout for Netanyahu.

Overwhelming attack on Rafah to lay it in ruins with 190 Murdered doing a series of grave Israeli war crimes.

Goldin’s was the second cousin once removed of Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon. Israel hid the family tie from the Israeli public by a military gag order while the army command decided what to do next. Hamas took no credit for capturing Goldin. But within minutes the words, “Hannibal! Hannibal!” blared across Israeli army communications systems.

“We could see tall buildings totally leveled. People were being shelled, their bodies flying into pieces right in front of our eyes.” + “The condition in the hospital was disastrous. It was full of wounded patients and martyrs. The Israelis insisted on bombing the hospital, so we evacuated and left the dead bodies. It was so disastrous I can not even put it into words. It was insane, we were waiting and the hospital was begging the Israelis to delay and give us some time to evacuate and get the wounded out. The whole time, ambulances were rushing to the hospital with large numbers of injured people. Even ambulances that had been attacked were arriving at that time.” + “Every floor was covered with wounded patients. We were treating the injured in dental chairs, doing surgery on the ground, doing anything we could to save people.” — According to UNRWA, by August 2, a full third of Gaza’s hospitals had been attacked by the Israeli military + 14 primary healthcare clinics + 29 ambulances belonging to either the Red Crescent or Ministry of Health. Evacuation of Hospitals leave the wounded with nowhere to go.

As the dead piled up throughout the day, Homs was forced to send for ice cream coolers and vegetable refrigerators from local shops. It was in coolers normally used to preserve food that Rafah-based journalist Mohammed Omer saw “the corpses of children, young men and women lying on top of one another, soaked in blood. Many were impossible to identify and only a few have been placed in white burial shrouds.”

Unusual wounds on many of the patients consisted of 1 millimeter entry wounds that did no damage to the skin or skeleton, but left widespread burns on the internal organs of the patient, usually prompting their deaths within two or three days. = Telltale signs of DIME weaponry, an experimental munition deployed on repeated occasions by the Israeli military against Gaza’s civilian population.

Israeli assaults on Rafah obliterated entire neighborhoods across the city and an Israeli F-16’s brought down a seven-story shopping center in downtown Rafah. Waves of aerial attacks raised the total of homeless to well over 100,000.