Summary
A controversial secret Israeli army operational order issued in 1986, in the wake of the Jibril prisoner-exchange deal, understood by Israeli soldiers as a licence to kill a comrade before they were taken prisoner; the army has since cancelled it, in Eyal Weizman’s account in Chapter 14 of From the River to the Sea (From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, lines 1040-1046).
Details
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Shaul Mofaz, chief of the general staff in 1999, explained it: “With all the pain that saying this entails, an abducted soldier, in contrast to a soldier who has been killed, is a national problem.” (line 1042)
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On 1 August 2014, during Operation Protective Edge, Palestinian fighters captured an IDF soldier near Rafah and the directive came into effect: the tunnel system he had been taken into was bombed and 135 Palestinian civilians, including entire families, were killed (line 1044).
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In the 2023 war, Weizman argues, the government seems to be “returning to the principle of preferring dead captives to a deal”, citing Bezalel Smotrich’s call to hit Hamas “mercilessly, without taking into serious consideration the matter of the captives” and Gilad Erdan’s statement that the hostages “would not prevent us from doing what we need to do” (line 1046).
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Haim Bresheeth-Žabner’s Chapter 24 of From the River to the Sea: on 7 October 2023 larger special forces used tanks to shell the houses in the kibbutzim where hostages were held, and the debate in Israel about whether this was confusion or the Hannibal Directive of 2006 is, in his judgment, likely to have been a combination of both factors (From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, lines 1907-1909).
Related pages
From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, Eyal Weizman, Hamas, Administrative Detention