Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant is currently in Washington, D.C.
In response to questioning from Sam Husseini on Tuesday regarding the Hannibal directive, State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller claimed: “I am not familiar in any way” with “that supposed directive.” See: “VIDEO: State Dept. Claims to Be Ignorant of Hannibal Directive.”
DAVID SHEEN, realdavidsheen@gmail.com, @davidsheen
Available for a limited number of interviews, Sheen recently wrote the in-depth piece “How an Israeli colonel invented the burned babies lie to justify genocide” and produced a 12-minute video showing witness testimony.
He writes: “Atrocities against babies that the head of the Israeli army’s national rescue unit alleged were committed by Hamas fighters when they attacked an Israeli kibbutz on 7 October were in fact lurid tales of the officer’s own invention, intended to provide a pretext for genocide in the Gaza Strip, and to protect the massacre’s actual perpetrators: Israel’s own soldiers, acting on the orders of a top general.
“As Israeli forces recaptured territories temporarily taken by Hamas earlier that day, the commander of the national rescue unit of the Israeli army’s Home Front Command Colonel Golan Vach led the recovery of corpses from the region, which spanned an area of hundreds of square kilometers. A week later, Vach began asserting that Hamas fighters had brutally executed ‘eight babies’ in a single house in Kibbutz Be’eri.
“‘They were concentrated there and they killed them and they burned them,’ Vach told a throng of reporters on 14 October, pointing through a smashed window into the charred living room of kibbutz resident Pessi Cohen.
“According to the only two captives who survived the bloodbath, however, a total of 13 civilians died at Cohen’s home, including Cohen herself, and none were babies or toddlers. …
“In May, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu published a video slamming International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan’s filing for an arrest warrant against him and defense minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Gaza. In the video, Netanyahu repeated the blood libel invented by Vach, claiming that Palestinian fighters who attacked Israel on 7 October ‘burned Jewish babies.’ …
“A December investigation by Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth revealed that Israel implemented against its own civilians captured on 7 October a version of its Hannibal directive: Israel used overwhelming lethal force even at the risk of killing Israelis along with their Palestinian captors, in order to avoid leaving them alive to be held captive in Gaza, and to avoid having to pay a steep political price for their return.
“Although Israel’s application of the Hannibal directive was widespread on 7 October, its implementation at the Cohen home stands out because more captives were killed there than in any other single structure on that day. One high-ranking Israeli officer called the army’s actions there an ‘exponential Hannibal.’”