How Israel killed hundreds of its own people on 7 October
One year on, the evidence is overwhelming.
Originally published by The Electronic Intifada.
One year ago today Palestinian fighters led by Hamas launched an unprecedented military offensive out of the Gaza Strip.
The immediate goal was to inflict a shattering blow against Israel’s army bases and militarized settlements which have besieged Gaza’s inhabitants for decades – all of which are built on land that Palestinian families were expelled from in 1948.
The bigger goal was to shatter a status quo in which Israel, the United States and their accomplices believed they had effectively sidelined the Palestinian cause, and to bring that struggle for liberation back to the forefront of world attention.
“Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” as Hamas called it, was, by any objective military measure, a stunning success.
It was said at Israel’s military headquarters that day that “the Gaza Division was overpowered,” a high-level source present later recalled to Israeli journalists. “These words still give me the chills.”
Covered from the air by armed drones and a barrage of rockets – which opened the offensive at 6:26 am exactly – Palestinian fighters launched a lightning raid over the Gaza boundary line.
The army bases were conquered for hours. Some of the settlements still had an armed Palestinian presence two days later.
The military communications infrastructure was instantly smashed. Simultaneous attacks took place by land, air and sea.
Palestinian drones took out tanks, guard posts and watchtowers.
Caught completely unprepared, most of the soldiers manning the bases were either killed or captured and taken back to Gaza as prisoners of war.
A reported 255 Israelis were captured, including soldiers and civilians. Since then, 154 of them have been released, mostly by Hamas in November’s prisoner exchange.
However, the figure of those released also includes some bodies of dead captives, mostly killed in Israeli strikes on Gaza. Of the remaining 101 prisoners, 35 have been officially declared dead by Israel. The real number is likely much higher.
Many have been killed by Israeli carpet bombing, and three escaped prisoners were shot dead by Israeli ground troops in Gaza City in December.
Al-Aqsa Flood was the first time in history that Palestinian armed groups were able to retake Palestinian territories lost since 1948, however briefly.
Israel’s response was also unprecedented, if not in its nature then undoubtedly in its scale – an undisguised genocide against the population of Gaza.
One “conservative” estimate published by the British medical journal The Lancet in July stated that as many as 186,000 Palestinians are likely to have been killed by Israel so far – almost 10 percent of Gaza’s population.
The UN says that 90 percent of people in Gaza have been driven out of their homes by Israel and that about a quarter of all structures in the strip have been destroyed.
The Western press took its lead from official Israeli disinformation. It was soon awash with lurid atrocity propaganda.
These lies about rape and beheaded babies were swiftly debunked by The Electronic Intifada and a small group of other independent media – often at the cost of being smeared by mainstream media and banned or censored by social media giants like YouTube.
Trying to paper over the cracks of its military and intelligence defeat, Israel has also been desperate to cover up another major scandal.
That Israel killed hundreds of its own people between 7 and 9 October 2023.
The regime ideologically justified this within Israeli society using a well-established national murder-suicide pact known in Israel as the “Hannibal Directive.”
The Electronic Intifada today presents a full overview of how Israel killed so many of its own people during the Palestinian offensive.
This article is based on a year’s worth of The Electronic Intifada’s investigative reporting, extensive monitoring and translation of the Hebrew-language Israeli media, independent examination of hundreds of videos, a recent pro-Israel film broadcast by the BBC and Paramount+ about the Supernova rave, official Israeli figures of the dead and a little-read UN Human Rights Council report.
We can conclude that during the Al-Aqsa Flood offensive:
Israel expanded the use of its murderous “Hannibal Directive” – designed to prevent soldiers from being taken alive as prisoners of war – by killing many of its own civilians.
The use of such “Hannibal” strikes are confirmed in a UN report published in June.
Fire from Israeli helicopters, drones, tanks and even ground troops was deliberately undertaken in order to prevent Palestinian fighters from taking live Israeli captives who could be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners.
At the initiative of the local Gaza Division, “Hannibal” was carried out right away: less than an hour after the Palestinian offensive began.
“Not a single vehicle can return to Gaza,” the division was ordered at 11:22 am.
By midday, an unambiguous order was given from the high command of the Israeli military (the so-called “Pit” headquarters, deep under Israel’s Hakirya building in downtown Tel Aviv) to invoke the Hannibal Directive throughout the entire region, “even if this means the endangerment or harming of the lives of civilians in the region, including the captives themselves.”
This bombing of Israeli captives by Israel continues in Gaza even today.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted in a December meeting with released captives and families of captives that they had been “under our bombardments” in Gaza.
Hundreds of Israelis were likely killed by Israel itself in “Hannibal” targeting incidents as well as unintentional crossfire.
Israel has been engaged in an aggressive cover-up of its crimes against its own people.
Killing their own people
If Hamas made a miscalculation in the planning of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, it was perhaps to overestimate the value Israeli planners assigned to the lives of their own people.
In 2006, Hamas successfully captured Israeli occupation soldier Gilad Shalit, exchanging him for 1,024 Palestinian prisoners in 2011 – including the current leader of Hamas Yahya Sinwar. A similar exchange was made with the Lebanese resistance in 2008.
Although exchanging prisoners is a common element of conflict, Israeli leaders felt weakened and embarrassed by what they saw as compromises. So they secretly modified their policies, preparing to strike with lethal force against their own people in the event of future captures.
At the heart of these plans was the Hannibal Directive, established in secret by Israeli generals in 1986, and named after an ancient Carthaginian general who killed himself rather than be captured alive by the Roman Empire.
Initially, the doctrine was targeted at soldiers.
In 2014, captured Israeli soldier Hadar Goldin was killed in a deliberate artillery strike during Israel’s August invasion of the Gaza Strip. Up to 200 Palestinian civilians were killed in the bombardment on Rafah, including 75 children.
As a result, the secretive military doctrine was forced into the light. Despite continued obfuscation, the Israeli military admitted that the directive existed and may have been used on an Israeli solider.
Two years later, the Israeli military distanced itself from the directive, claiming that “the order as it is understood today” would be canceled. “This move was not necessarily a full change in policy but a clarification,” The Times of Israel reported in 2016.
Yet multiple Israeli press reports have now confirmed that Hannibal was not only reactivated on 7 October – if it ever truly went away – but was actually extended to captured Israeli civilians on their way to Gaza.
Bombing Israelis on the road to Gaza
Overestimating Israel’s humanity, Hamas may have been ignorant of this possibility in its two-year preparation and training for the offensive. Over the past year, the group has repeatedly agreed to exchange Israeli prisoners for Palestinian prisoners.
But aside from the Israeli captives released during the four-day pause in November (including the children and noncombatant captives) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has adamantly refused to make a deal.
Instead, Israel has systematically bombed every part of the Gaza Strip – including areas where the Israeli captives are being held.
Israelis released in the November prisoner exchange have told the media that the main threat to their lives while they were held in Gaza was not Hamas, but Israeli attacks.
Chen Almog-Goldstein and three of her children were at one point held in a Gazan supermarket which was bombed by Israel.
“It was atrocious,” she told The Guardian. “It was the first time we really felt like our lives were in danger.”
The bombing “was closing up on us to the point where the Hamas guards put mattresses over us on the floor to cover us, and then they covered us with their bodies to protect us from our own forces’ shooting.”
In a town hall-style meeting with relatives of the captives, Benjamin Netanyahu admitted that captives had been “under our bombardments and our [military] activity there,” Hebrew news site Ynet reported in December.
“Every day in captivity was very hard,” one former detainee said at the angry meeting. “I was in a house when there were bombardments all around. We were sitting in tunnels and we were very afraid that, not Hamas, but Israel would kill us, and then they’ll say: ‘Hamas killed you.’”
Another released detainee said: “The fact is that I was in a hideaway that was bombed, and we had to be smuggled away, and we were injured. Not to mention that we were shot at by a helicopter when we were on our way to Gaza … You are bombing the tunnel routes exactly in the area where they [the other captives] are.”
As the second released detainee’s testimony about being shot at by a helicopter on the way to Gaza proves, the captives were also killed and attacked by Israel while Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was still happening.
Within the first hour of the offensive, Israeli forces began shooting and bombing Israeli captives on their way to Gaza.
“Hannibal at Erez”
An investigation by Israeli newspaper Haaretz based on documents and testimonies of soldiers found evidence that these Hannibal attacks came at least as early as 7:18 am – only 52 minutes after the start of the offensive.
The Haaretz piece was published in English in July.
But the paper lagged six months behind its competitor, Yedioth Ahronoth. In January, Yedioth’s weekend supplement 7 Days ran a landmark investigative piece laying out a timeline of the Al-Aqsa Flood offensive from the Israeli military perspective.
The paper has never published an official English translation of the article. The Electronic Intifada remains the only publication in the world to release a full professional translation, which you can read here.
The 7 Days investigation found that “at midday of October 7th, the IDF [Israeli military] instructed all its fighting units to perform the Hannibal Directive in practice, although it did so without stating that name explicitly.”
Well-sourced Israeli military and intelligence reporters Ronen Bergman and Yoav Zitun explained in the long piece that “the instruction was to stop ‘at any cost’ any attempt by Hamas terrorists to return to Gaza, using language very similar to that of the original Hannibal Directive.”
In contrast to the 7 Days investigation, the more recent Haaretz piece found that the name of the doctrine was explicitly invoked – and very early on: “One of these decisions was made at 7:18 am … ‘Hannibal at Erez.’”
Erez is the massive Israeli military checkpoint and base caging Palestinians into the north of the Gaza Strip. It had been totally overrun by Palestinian fighters and besieged Israeli troops seem to have called for an airstrike on their own position.
That the 7 Days investigation reached the conclusion Hannibal was invoked from the top of Israel’s military hierarchy is crucial.
It shows that the reactivation and expansion of the Hannibal Directive that day was not a matter of rogue individual troops or of simple chaos and confusion.
It was a matter of policy.
Orders and chaos
Hannibal was ordered from the top after the generals under the Hakirya building in Tel Aviv realized that Israeli soldiers and settlers all over the Gaza frontier region were being captured en masse.
They wanted the captives dead as soon as possible.
Israeli troops in the field had been trained in the procedure for years and immediately understood what they had to do.
A report by a UN commission quotes one tank commander who opened fire at Israeli captives coming from the settlement of Nir Oz.
“Something in my gut feeling made me think that they [his soldiers] could be on them [the vehicles heading to Gaza],” he said. “Yes, I could have killed them, but I decided that this is the right decision. I prefer stopping the abduction so they won’t be taken.”
Ending Israelis’ captivity by killing them is the Hannibal doctrine in a nutshell.
In November last year, Nof Erez, an Israeli Air Force colonel, admitted to a Hebrew-language podcast that the response to Operation Al-Aqsa Flood “was a mass Hannibal.”
There was also an incredibly chaotic situation that day. In a separate article by Yoav Zitun, the Israeli military admitted to an “immense and complex quantity” of what it called “friendly fire” incidents.
Caught entirely off guard over a Jewish holiday weekend, Israeli forces found themselves unable to communicate with each other after the Palestinians destroyed the communications infrastructure.
The 7 Days investigation found that “40 percent of the communication sites such as towers with relay antennas … near the Gaza Strip … were destroyed by Hamas” that morning.
Even the Palestinian resistance was caught off guard by the sheer scope of its own success. And, to an extent, there was a degree of chaos in the Palestinian fighters’ assault.
Collateral damage?
Soon after the initial wave of Hamas’ vanguard commandos (known as the Nukhba force, Arabic for “elite”) breached the fence in almost 50 locations, smaller armed groups – including Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – joined in.
About an hour after the offensive started, a wave of Palestinian civilians began to flow through the breaches in the fence and managed to enter their homeland. Some of these people seem to have attacked or captured Israeli noncombatants in the militarized settlements that surround Gaza.
The chaotic situation, combined with Israel’s use of its own civilians as human shields to besiege and occupy Gaza also meant that not all the Israeli casualties of the Palestinian resistance that day were combatants.
Despite efforts by the Western media and politicians to paint a picture of evil, baby-killing Palestinian “terrorists” rampaging around southern Israel slaughtering as many civilians as possible, it is clear that Israeli noncombatants were often caught in the crossfire between armed Israeli forces and the Palestinian fighters.
Pitched battles broke out all over the region. Roughly 1,000-3,000 Palestinian fighters are estimated to have been involved.
Despite the common misconception that the Israeli army was nowhere to be found that day, the UN report and the 7 Days investigation concluded that Israeli combatants were present all over the region, and from very early on.
Within the first 24 minutes of the assault, the Israeli military scrambled at least six armed aircraft: two F-16 bombers, two F-35 bombers and two of the lethal Hermes 450 drones made by Elbit Systems.
Two more aircraft – Apache attack helicopters – also arrived at the Be’eri settlement within one hour.
The UN report says that it “confirmed that at least eight Apache helicopters were dispatched to the area around the Gaza border on 7 October” and that “some 23 tanks were stationed throughout the whole border area with Gaza” (Editor’s note: in fact, Israel has no declared borders).
Human shields
But there is also no doubt that the Israelis were overwhelmed, briefly outgunned and often outsmarted by the Palestinian fighters. The battle for Kibbutz Be’eri, for example, continued over the course of three days.
Nonetheless, the presence of armed Israeli combatants embedded throughout the civilian population – often using the latter as effective human shields – speaks to the operational challenges faced by Hamas on the ground that day.
The UN report even documents some cases of Israeli “civilians” picking up weapons to engage in clashes with the Palestinian fighters.
Hamas’ deputy political leader Khalil al-Hayya said in an interview with the BBC last week that its fighters had been told not to target civilians during the assault, but that there were individual failings in sticking to that plan.
He also alluded to the military difficulties faced by Palestinians trying to distinguish who was who: “Fighters may have felt that they were in danger.”
In “Our Narrative,” a document Hamas released in January, the group admitted, “Maybe some faults happened during Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’s implementation due to the rapid collapse of the Israeli security and military system, and the chaos caused along the border areas with Gaza.”
One such “fault” was the fact that Hamas’ intelligence branch seems not to have anticipated the presence of the all-night “Supernova” trance music rave.
This event took place in open fields less than three miles from the Re’im military base.
Re’im was the headquarters of the Israeli army’s Gaza Division – the number one target of the Al-Aqsa Flood offensive.
But the separation between Israeli settler “civilians” and Israeli combatants is not always clear cut.
Planted around the Gaza region mostly after the forced expulsion of the Palestinians by Zionist militias and the new Israeli army between 1947 and 1949, the settlements besieging Gaza were conceived by Israeli military doctrine as a belt of human shields to protect Israel’s occupation and suppress the far bigger population of Gaza.
The population of the Gaza Strip is more than 80 percent refugees – those expelled from their homes in order to make room for the new state of Israel in 1948 and after, along with their descendants.
One of these so-called “Gaza Envelope” settlements, founded in 1951, is even called “Magen” – literally the Hebrew for “shield.” Another, Nahal Oz, was established as an explicitly military settlement.
According to the Jewish National Fund, a colonial arm of the Israeli state, Nahal Oz was intended to “supply the IDF with soldiers.” It was also intended to “become a civilian center and serve as the first line of defense against potential future Arab invasions while providing a base of operations and resources for military forces operating in peripheral regions.”
UN laundering of Israeli propaganda
In June this year, the United Nations Human Rights Council issued a report: “Detailed findings on attacks carried out on and after 7 October 2023 in Israel.”
What little media attention it received tended to focus on how the report (along with an accompanying document focusing on Gaza) had concluded that “Israel and Hamas have both committed war crimes,” as The Guardian put it.
The report’s authors described themselves as an “independent international commission of inquiry” into the offensive.
For the most part, the report does not disclose its sources. The authors say that this is due to unspecified “protection concerns.”
Nonetheless, it is clear from the instances where the report does disclose its sources that they relied almost entirely on Israeli claims. Where it does cite Palestinian sources, they are for the most part bodycam videos from killed or captured fighters. These were released by the Israeli occupation authorities and are highly likely to have been subjected to selective editing.
Therefore it is unsurprising to find that the document ends up, for the most part, siding with the debunked Israeli narrative about Palestinian atrocities. It does this to the point of absurdity at times.
In one instance, the commission of inquiry reverses the chronology of events to give the impression that a Palestinian fighter deliberately executed an Israeli baby at Kibbutz Be’eri, after they had broken into a room.
Yet, according to press reports, the death was actually the tragic result of a stray bullet. Milla Cohen, a 10-month-old baby, died when a Palestinian fighter shot through a door before he broke into a room in a settlement house to take captives.
Even worse, the UN report appears to rely heavily on the discredited Jewish extremist group ZAKA as a source, citing it once explicitly, and frequently citing it obliquely as unnamed “first responders.”
These “first responders” then tell lurid stories about supposed Palestinian “war crimes.”
And yet even the report admits that ZAKA is “not trained or equipped to manage large, complex crime scenes and may have also tainted, or even tampered with, evidence” (emphasis added).
“One first responder working for ZAKA” – who the report does not name – “provided inaccurate and exaggerated accounts of findings in media interviews.”
This may have been a reference to senior ZAKA leader Yossi Landau.
Landau was forced by Al Jazeera journalists to admit on camera – for a documentary broadcast in March – that his initial story about Palestinian fighters executing 10 Israeli children by burning them alive was a fiction.
Confronted with his own lack of evidence, Landau admitted: “When you look at them and they’re burned you don’t know exactly the ages. So you’re talking about 18 years old, 20 years old … you just don’t look on the spot … to see the ages or something like that.”
Landau was later forced to step back from his position in the group after internal disputes over money and power.
Hannibal strikes confirmed by UN
Despite the report’s authors apparently trying their best to launder Israeli atrocity propaganda into the UN system, the document does nevertheless contain an astonishing collection of evidence confirming The Electronic Intifada’s reporting over the last year that Israel itself killed many, if not most, of the Israelis that day.
Some of the evidence in the UN report is only oblique, and requires cross referencing with Hebrew-language media reports about the Hannibal doctrine and the unprecedented way it was used on 7 October 2023.
But some of it is explicit.
Over the course of three pages, the report details some of what is known about “the application of the ‘Hannibal Directive’” that day.
The commission wrote that it “documented strong indications that the ‘Hannibal Directive’ was used in several instances on 7 October, harming Israelis at the same time as striking Palestinian militants.”
In its section on the Hannibal Directive, the UN report even states that “Israeli helicopters were present at the Nova site and may have shot at targets on the ground, including civilian vehicles.” It states that “one or two helicopters” were “present over the Nova festival site in the mid-morning hours.”
This is something The Electronic Intifada first reported in November.
The UN report cites the testimony of two unnamed witnesses to back this up, including an Israeli army “reserve brigadier general, who fought against militants near a parked tank close to the Nova site” and explained that “he called the Gaza Battalion to request an attack helicopter.”
The presence of attack helicopters – and of at least one tank – in the battle for the Supernova rave site could also go some way towards explaining the high number of noncombatant casualties among the fleeing rave attendees that morning.
The Supernova rave
Held in a location less than four miles away from the massive open-air prison camp that is the Gaza Strip, Supernova was put on by an event management company calling itself the “Tribe of Nova.”
Its defenders have condemned the Palestinian fighters for attacking a “peace festival,” while the event’s critics have decried it as akin to German civilians dancing outside the gates of Auschwitz during the Nazi Holocaust.
Often referred to as the “Nova music festival” by Western media, the event on its official webpage actually named itself the “Supernova Sukkot Gathering.” A recent film about the event showed that it was more akin to the illegal raves often organized in secret locations in many Western countries.
Supernova was not illegal and was coordinated with the local Israeli police force (which was armed and present in advance to guard the event). But for reasons that are not entirely clear, the rave’s location was not announced until 6 October.
Participants in the high profile Israeli film We Will Dance Again confirmed that the Supernova location was kept secret from ticket holders until the last minute.
This (rather than any confusion about the days of the event or extension of the time, as is sometimes erroneously said online) explains why Hamas had no clue about the presence of the rave in the fields between Gaza and the biggest military base in the area – the regional headquarters at Re’im.
The Supernova deaths
The rave is often reported to be the largest single site of deaths that took place on 7 October. The UN report said that 364 out of the 3,000 total ravers were “killed either at the site, near Kibbutz Re’im or in adjacent locations.”
But a detailed breakdown of the deaths recently published by The Times of Israel (based on an Israeli TV channel’s investigation) shows that more than 60 percent of this figure actually died outside of the designated grounds of the rave.
This is important for two reasons.
Firstly, despite the fact that the film We Will Dance Again tries to paint a picture of villainous Palestinian terrorists deliberately attacking civilians, it is clear from all available evidence that the rave was not a planned target of the Hamas offensive that day.
Indeed, the secret location of the event meant that a few Palestinian fighters – perhaps some from armed factions and probably some armed civilians – stumbled on the event in the course of their assault on the military bases.
Armed clashes with the Israeli forces – including police, soldiers and at least one tank, as well as armed Israeli “civilians” present – swiftly ensued.
Israeli intelligence has concluded that the Palestinians had no prior knowledge of the rave.
Secondly, the breakdown published by The Times of Israel places the deaths of ravers outside the rave grounds as far away as Sderot (11 miles north of the Supernova site) and the Re’im military base (only 2.3 miles south)
Plotting these sites of death onto Google Earth and cross referencing them with the sites of ambushes set up by Hamas’ elite commando force – as detailed by the 7 Days investigation – shows the two often coincide.
It is therefore likely that the deaths of some of these fleeing ravers were the unintended consequences of Palestinian ambushes set up to intercept Israeli army reinforcements headed to the region.
“While many reinforcements were flowing south,” Ronen Bergman and Yoav Zitun wrote in the 7 Days investigation, Hamas’ commando force “had foreseen these reinforcements and took over the strategic junctions … where they awaited the forces … a lot of blood was shed at those junctions, both of soldiers and of civilians.”
The 7 Days piece also relates instances of Israeli soldiers rushing south to join the fight on their own initiative – including in their own civilian vehicles.
“Commanders who had already learned from the media or from friends that something was going on … scrambled to get to the Gaza Envelope,” Bergman and Zitun explained.
One brigade commander told the journalists that, “I came with my private vehicle to the Yad Mordechai junction [2.3 miles north of the Erez checkpoint] after I saw [the attack] on the news at home.”
Exploding houses in the settlements
Evidence of deliberate Israeli “mass Hannibal” killings of Israeli civilians at the kibbutzim and other settlements surrounding Gaza is clear and undeniable.
Video footage and press reports of the Al-Aqsa Flood offensive show that many buildings in the settlements were completely destroyed, in a manner consistent with heavy weaponry only known by military experts to be in the possession of the Israeli military, and not in the possession of Palestinian fighters.
While some buildings and cars did show signs of being burned, many others were clearly bombed from the air by Israeli drones and attack helicopters or shelled by Israeli tanks.
Nof Erez, the Israeli Air Force colonel who admitted that 7 October was a “mass Hannibal” event, answered positively when asked by the interviewer if they “exploded all kinds of houses inside the settlements.”
Erez insisted that his pilots only did so with “permission” from their superior officers. “I saw numerous drones above every settlement on a computer image, which we can see in every IDF [Israeli military] command,” he explained.
Footage on Israeli TV has shown Israeli tanks present and firing in the settlement of Kibbutz Be’eri.
Most infamously, Brigadier General Barak Hiram admitted to ordering his tanks to fire at Pessi Cohen’s house in Kibbutz Be’eri – “even at the cost of the civilians,” as he told The New York Times.
Palestinian fighters from Hamas had taken 15 people captive and held them at the home, while they attempted to negotiate their exit to Gaza.
Investigations by The Electronic Intifada have concluded that most of the dead were highly likely to have been killed by Hiram’s assault.
The Electronic Intifada was the first to publish in English the eyewitness account of survivor Yasmin Porat who said that the Israeli troops arrived at the scene and “eliminated everyone” with heavy gunfire and tank shelling.
Porat, Palestinian commander Hasan Hamduna (who surrendered) and one other captive – Hadas Dagan – were the only three survivors of Barak Hiram’s massacre.
Dagan insisted in testimony to Porat – which The Electronic Intifada first reported in November last year – that everyone else in and around the building was either shot or “burned completely” by the Israeli tank fire.
The victims of this apocalypse included 12-year-old Israeli twins, Liel and Yanai Hatsroni.
Sickeningly, Liel’s photo was later used in official Israeli propaganda which falsely claimed that Hamas had massacred and burned the girl to death.
“Murdered in her home by Hamas monsters … just because she’s Jewish,” former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett lied.
Hannibal at Supernova?
What is still unclear about the Supernova rave is how many of the dead were killed by Palestinians, and whether any were killed in “Hannibal” attacks by Israel.
Unlike in the more built-up areas such as the military bases and the kibbutzim – where there is clear visual evidence of bombed buildings and conclusive eyewitness accounts – the visual situation in and around the Supernova site was more chaotic.
There were few built-up structures for Israeli aircraft or tanks to explode, as they did in the settlements.
Video and other photographic evidence does show that the fields around the exit of the site next to the armed Israeli checkpoint were intensively burned and blackened.
It is unclear whether this was the result of the helicopter or tank attacks, or the result of fires which may have caught alight after Palestinian rocket-propelled grenade strikes.
What is known is that Israeli armed forces on site set up a roadblock at the main exit, causing a massive backlog of cars waiting to leave the site. Many ravers ended up fleeing on foot, east across the fields as the firefight broke out.
While the We Will Dance Again film conspicuously fails to mention the roadblock set up by Israeli forces, an early CNN report does show the roadblock on its map of the scene, and The Times of Israel report states that it was probably set up as early as 7:00 am.
Journalist William Van Wagenen has detailed in a report for The Cradle that the roadblock likely led to Israeli forces unintentionally trapping some escaping ravers in a firefight between them and Palestinian fighters advancing on the Re’im military base from the north.
Psychoactive drugs
One thing that is clear from both We Will Dance Again and a Haaretz interview with an Israeli psychologist who has treated survivors is that the use of psychoactive drugs at the rave was widespread.
As participants arrived at the site on the night of 6 October, “everyone’s saying that they’re going to get so high,” one participant in the film recalled.
According to the Haaretz interview and to the film, ravers used ecstasy, acid, cocaine, magic mushrooms and possibly ketamine. Worse, many of the ravers had deliberately timed their dosages to kick in at sunrise – which turned out to be just before the Palestinian offensive began – with rocket salvos from Gaza starting at 6:26 am.
“This sucks so much! Everyone is high,” one participant in the film recalled feeling as the rockets soared overhead. Acid, another explained, “can make things seem much worse.”
Psychedelic drugs, the Israeli psychologist explained, can lead to a situation in which “parts of the unconscious also rise to consciousness.”
All of this makes it unlikely that many ravers were in a fit state to discern whether they were being shot at by Israelis, Palestinians or both as they ran for their lives.
Although the existence of the Hannibal Directive is an open secret inside Israel, its use on Israeli civilian targets was – as far as we know – unprecedented before 7 October 2023.
Hannibal attacks all over the south
About 105 residents were killed at Kibbutz Be’eri.
It is currently unknown how many of those were killed by Palestinians and how many by Israelis. The UN report states that “at least 57 structures in the kibbutz were destroyed or sustained damage, amounting to more than one third of all residential buildings.”
Many of these appear from the visual evidence to have been destroyed by Israel.
But one important fact to bear in mind is that Israel’s “Hannibal” massacre of Israelis at Be’eri was repeated all over the region.
We only know so much about the Pessi Cohen house massacre because two civilians survived to tell their story.
Similar incidents happened elsewhere. But in most places, there were few survivors, especially of the aerial bombardments.
An all-female tank unit commandeered a military vehicle it was untrained to use and stormed through the gates of Holit, an Israeli settlement near the boundary with Egypt and the frontier with Gaza, more than 14 miles south of the Supernova rave.
“We break into the community, crash the gate,” one of the soldiers told Israeli Channel 12. “The soldier points and tells me, ‘Shoot there, the terrorists are there.’ I ask him, ‘Are there civilians there?’ He says, ‘I don’t know, just shoot.’”
The tank commander then claims she decided not to shoot – but immediately contradicts herself: “I fire with my machine gun at a house.”
Similar to the visual evidence of Hannibal attacks on Israelis by Israel at Kibbutz Be’eri, an investigation by The Electronic Intifada last year also concluded that the same sort of house explosions took place at Kibbutz Kfar Aza.
The UN report lists a surprisingly high number of places where Hannibal attacks possibly or certainly took place.
Outside the Israeli settlement of Nirim (which lies on the path between the Palestinian city of Khan Younis and the Gaza Division’s Re’im military headquarters) one Israeli tank crew departed to Nir Oz, another nearby settlement.
Once there, the UN report states, “they noticed hundreds of people crossing into Israel and back to Gaza and they shot at them, including at vehicles laden with people, some of whom may have been hostages” (emphasis added).
The next paragraph of the report hints at the possibility of similar incidents at Nitzana, Kissufim and Holit.
How many were killed by Israel?
Despite initially claiming that 1,400 people were “murdered by Hamas” on 7 October last year, Israel soon began revising the figure downwards.
In November, the Israeli government announced that 200 out of this figure were in fact Hamas fighters. They had been so badly burned by Israeli bombings they were completely unidentifiable.
This demonstrates how indiscriminate much of Israel’s fire was that day.
The Israeli death count now stands at 1,154, according to Al Jazeera.
Of these, at least 314 are said in the UN report to have been “Israeli military personnel.”
In March, a comprehensive survey of three Israeli death tolls in Hebrew by the Al Jazeera Investigative Unit put the number of armed combatants higher, totaling 372.
As well as soldiers, the Al Jazeera figure includes police, security guards (i.e. armed settlement militias) and “security personnel.”
The 7 Days investigation concluded that officers from the Shin Bet – the undercover Israeli “internal security” agency – were also sent to join the battle in the south: “In the course of the fighting, 10 of the organization’s people were killed.”
The English edition of the Haaretz database of the dead revealed the names of three of these people – Yossi Tahar, Smadar Mor Idan and Omer Gvera.
None of the three are listed in the database as combatants. It is therefore likely that the other seven dead Shin Bet combatants are also secretly listed as “civilians” on the database.
Al Jazeera’s raw data – provided by the investigative unit to The Electronic Intifada for this article – reveals that its figures of “security personnel” does indeed name eight Shin Bet officers among the dead.
The 372 declared combatants plus the two undeclared Shin Bet officers gives us 374 dead combatants – almost a third of the total dead Israelis.
Taking those away from the 1,154 total dead leaves us with a maximum of 780 dead Israeli civilians.
This means that at least 41 percent of the initial (erroneous) figure of 1,400 dead were actually combatants – mostly Israelis, but including 200 of the dead Palestinian fighters.
“Everyone in the vehicle was killed”
If a maximum of 780 unarmed Israelis died during the Al-Aqsa Flood offensive, how many of these were killed by Israel and how many by Palestinians?
The current answer to this question is that it is impossible to know without a truly independent international investigation.
And, as the UN report makes clear, Israel is blocking just such an investigation. “The commission considers that Israel is obstructing its investigations into events on and since 7 October 2023, both in Israel and in the occupied Palestinian territory.”
But it is possible for us to reach some tentative conclusions.
Al Jazeera’s investigative film found that “at least 18” of the noncombatant dead were definitely killed by Israeli ground troops and that at least 27 of the Israelis in Palestinian captivity “died somewhere between their home and the Gaza fence in circumstances that have not been explained.”
But Al Jazeera’s raw data shows that these are very well-attested and deliberate Hannibal killings, such as the infamous Pessi Cohen house massacre carried out by Barak Hiram.
This doesn’t take account of several other key figures, from which we can extrapolate a possible rough idea of the order of magnitude of the overall Hannibal and unintentional “friendly fire” deaths.
The 7 Days investigation states that Israeli military investigators “examined some 70 vehicles that … did not reach Gaza because on their way they had been hit by fire from a helicopter gunship, a UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] or a tank, and at least in some of the cases, everyone in the vehicle was killed” (emphasis added).
It is unknown how many Israelis those 70 vehicles contained, but given what is known about other incidents, some cars probably contained several. These vehicles alone may have accounted for a very large number of Israeli civilian deaths.
Palestinian captors often packed multiple Israeli prisoners into pickup trucks, expropriated cars and even in some cases trailers dragged by tractors.
Fleeing Israelis did likewise.
One raver in the We Will Dance Again film describes desperately packing into cars to escape the Supernova site.
There were “a million people inside” the car, he recalled. “Half my body is outside,” he added, explaining that he was hanging out of the window.
Israeli combat helicopter footage released online and compiled in the Al Jazeera film shows one video of about a dozen people fleeing a packed car as they are fired on by the Israelis. Their fates are unknown.
The film shows many similar videos. It’s unclear where exactly near Gaza these incidents took place. You can watch the full film on Al Jazeera’s website or in the YouTube video embedded below (due to the platform’s age restrictions, you will need an appropriate YouTube account).
A November news report on the Israeli website *Ynet* quoted a helicopter pilot as saying that “in the first four hours from the start of the battles” alone, Israeli aircraft “attacked about 300 targets, most in Israeli territory.”
The report stated that they were commanded to “shoot at everything” near the fence with Gaza.
The reporter of the Hebrew piece was Yoav Zitun, the co-author of the 7 Days investigation, a well-sourced Israeli military reporter close to the intelligence and military establishment.
The drone operators seem to have been even more deadly than the helicopter pilots. The 7 Days piece says they often “took decisions to attack” by themselves and that by the end of the day on 7 October, “the squadron performed no fewer than 110 attacks on some 1,000 targets, most of which were inside Israel.”
If “targets” includes individual persons, it’s hard to know how many would have been Israelis. The pilots probably often did not know themselves. If a hit “target” also includes individual cars, the 1,000 targets hit could have easily resulted in hundreds of dead people.
The car “cemetery”
In November hundreds of the vehicles blown up during the Palestinian offensive were collected by Israeli troops and piled up in a scrapyard near the settlements of Tekuma and Netivot.
Photos and drone footage of the scrapyard clearly showed many of the cars were completely flattened and twisted in a manner consistent with Israeli bombing from the air.
In short, the cars looked very similar to the Palestinian cars (of both civilians and fighters) habitually bombed by Israel from the air in Gaza over the years.
Today, it seems the scrapyard has become something of a tourist attraction for Israel and its supporters – a site they refer to as a “car burial ground.” In one video shot there this past summer, an Israeli army tour guide says that the scrapyard contains “1,650 vehicles that were brought here.”
In one ambulance alone, he says, from the ash and “human dust” they recovered, the remains of 18 people were found.
Whatever the true figure of the Israelis dead from “Hannibal” attacks by Israel, it does seem entirely plausible that Israel killed hundreds of the Israelis who died during the course of the offensive.
The whitewash
For the last year, there has been a systematic cover-up by Israel.
Most of the Israeli reporting on this has been in Hebrew only. And not due to lack of access to English language media.
The lead author of the 7 Days investigation was Ronen Bergman – who is also a high profile New York Timesreporter and bestselling author of several hagiographies of the Mossad and other Israeli spy agencies.
Bergman has yet to write about the Hannibal Directive in English in The New York Times or elsewhere.
Very few autopsies were carried out – not on the dead at Pessi Cohen’s house in Kibbutz Be’eri at any rate.
In the case of that particular crime, it would have likely been impossible anyway. Barak Hiram’s tank shelling meant most of his Israeli victims were burned to cinders – including 12-year-old Liel Hatsroni.
Many bodies were prematurely buried. Israeli cars destroyed in apparent “Hannibal” killings were crushed by Israeli authorities before being buried in the “cemetery” on a religious pretext.
The UN commission’s report criticizes Israel for barring them access to the country. “Israeli officials not only refused to cooperate with the commission’s investigation but also reportedly barred medical professionals and others from being in contact,” the report states.
In a whitewash “investigation” of the killings at Pessi Cohen’s house, the army in July largely cleared Barak Hiram of any wrongdoing.
The remains of the house have now been demolished by the army.
Last month, Hiram was promoted – appointed head of the humbled Gaza Division.
His predecessor, Brigadier General Avi Rosenfeld had quit over his failure to prevent the 7 October 2023 offensive.
Comparing the assault with Egypt’s surprise October 1973 offensive to regain territories occupied by Israel, one high-level source who was in the “Pit” military headquarters deep under Tel Aviv that day, recalled to Bergman and Zitun the following words that were intoned.
“It is unimaginable. It’s like the Old City of Jerusalem in the War of Independence or the outposts along the Suez Canal during the Yom Kippur War. We thought that this could never happen again.”
“This will remain a scar burnt into our flesh forever.”
With additional research by Maureen Murphy and translation from Hebrew by Dena Shunra.
Edited after publication to add the quote, “Not a single vehicle can return to Gaza.”
Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist and associate editor with The Electronic Intifada. He is author of the book Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2023).
"Look what you made me do!" is a favorite trope among abusers and Zionists.
An excellent and very comprehensive report which must be shared (and discussed) as widely as possible. Well done Asa for putting this together.