[News] Israeli HQ ordered troops to shoot Israeli captives on 7 October

[Anti-Imperialist News]

electronicintifada.net
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/israeli-hq-ordered-troops-shoot-israeli-captives-7-october>
Israeli HQ ordered troops to shoot Israeli captives on 7 October

Asa Winstanley <https://electronicintifada.net/people/asa-winstanley> Rights
and Accountability
<https://electronicintifada.net/blog/rights-and-accountability> 20 January
2024
------------------------------
[image: Dozens of destroyed cars and vans sitting in an open lot]

Vehicles stacked up near the southern Israeli town of Netivot, near Gaza,
in November. They were destroyed soon after Palestinian fighters began
taking captives on 7 October. A new investigation by Israeli journalists
has concluded that 70 such vehicles were blown up by Israeli fire.
UPI

At midday on 7 October Israel’s supreme military command ordered all units
to prevent the capture of Israeli citizens “at any cost” – even by firing
on them.

The military “instructed all its fighting units to perform the Hannibal
Directive <https://electronicintifada.net/tags/hannibal-directive> in
practice, although it did so without stating that name explicitly,” Israeli
journalists revealed last weekend.

The revelations came in a new investigative article
<https://w.ynet.co.il/yediot/7-days/time-of-darkness> by Ronen Bergman and
Yoav Zitun, two journalists with extensive sources inside Israel’s military
and intelligence establishment.

They also revealed that “some 70 vehicles” driven by Palestinian fighters
returning to Gaza were blown up by Israeli helicopter gunships, drones or
tanks.

Many of these vehicles contained Israeli captives.

The journalists wrote that, “it is not clear at this stage how many of the
captives were killed due to the operation of this order” to the air force
that they should prevent return to Gaza at all costs.

“At least in some of the cases, everyone in the vehicle was killed,” the
journalists explain.

The Hebrew piece has not been translated into English by its
publisher, *Yedioth
Ahronoth*, a newspaper which translates many of its articles. You can read
The Electronic Intifada’s full English version, translated by Dena Shunra,
below.

The secretive “Hannibal” doctrine is named after an ancient Carthaginian
general who poisoned himself rather
<https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hannibal-Carthaginian-general-247-183-BCE/Exile-and-death>
than be captured alive by the Roman Empire.

The order aims at stopping Israelis from being taken captive by resistance
fighters who could later use them as leverage in prisoner swap deals.
“Overpowered”

The latest revelations confirm The Electronic Intifada’s reporting since 7
October
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/evidence-israel-killed-its-own-citizens-7-october/41156>
that many – if not most – of the Israeli civilians killed that day were
killed by Israel itself, not Palestinian fighters.

Initial claims stated that 1,400 Israelis were killed by Hamas in the
Palestinian assault that began on 7 October. But Israel has repeatedly
revised this figure downwards
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/we-blew-israeli-houses-7-october-says-israeli-colonel>,
so that it now stands at “over 1,000.”

It was also clear from the outset that hundreds of the dead were in fact
Israeli soldiers.

Hamas maintains that they targeted military bases and outposts, and that
their aim was to capture rather than kill Israeli civilians, and to kill or
capture Israeli soldiers.

Based on interviews with those present, the new article says that top
officers at Israel’s underground military headquarters in Tel Aviv on 7
October declared in shock that “the Gaza Division was overpowered.”

One person present that day – referring back to earlier Israeli shocks such
as the surprise counterattack by Egypt and Syria in October 1973 – told the
journalists that, “We thought that this could never happen again, and this
will remain a scar burnt into our flesh forever.”

As well as what they claim was “heroism,” Bergman and Zitun’s investigation
reveals what they describe as “a long series of failures, mishaps, and
chaos in the army,” including “a command chain that failed almost entirely.”

Palestinian resistance fighters successfully targeted the communications
infrastructure, they write, destroying 40 percent of communication sites
around the Gaza frontier, including towers and relay antennas.

For hours, therefore, Israel’s top brass were in the dark as to the scale
of the assault.

To make up for this, “they turned to television and to social media feeds,
primarily to Telegram, to Israeli channels, but primarily to Hamas
channels.”
1,000 drone targets inside Israel

In November, The Electronic Intifada reported
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/shoot-everything-how-israeli-pilots-killed-their-own-civilians>
on Israeli air force footage, as well as interviews in an Israeli article
with attack helicopter pilots, showing that they had been ordered to “shoot
at everything” moving between Israel’s frontier settlements and Gaza.

That Israeli article stated that “in the first four hours … helicopters and
fighter craft attacked about 300 targets, most in Israeli territory.”

Bergman and Zitun’s new article says that by the end of the day, drone
squadron 161 alone (which flies Elbit’s
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/elbit-systems> Hermes 450 drone)
“performed no fewer than 110 attacks on some 1,000 targets, most of which
were inside Israel.”

As reported by The Electronic Intifada in English for the first time,
Israeli news media last month showed footage of tank operators firing
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/israeli-general-killed-israelis-7-october-then-lied-about-it/43176>
at Israeli homes inside the kibbutzes during the battles with the
Palestinian resistance on 7 October.

The Electronic Intifada was also the first to reveal in English
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/israeli-forces-shot-their-own-civilians-kibbutz-survivor-says/38861>,
back in October, the testimony of Yasmin Porat
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/yasmin-porat>, one of only two
survivors of an Israeli attack on a home in Kibbutz Be’eri which contained
around a dozen captives held by Palestinian fighters.

Porat told Israeli media that the Palestinians had treated them “humanely”
but that the Israeli army ended a standoff with the fighters by
deliberately tank shelling the whole house, even though captives were still
present.

She later elaborated that the casualties of the Israeli attack
included 12-year-old
Israeli captive Liel Hatsroni
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/israeli-child-burned-completely-israeli-tank-fire-kibbutz/41706>.
Hatstroni’s photo was later used in propaganda by Israeli officials,
wrongly claiming she had been burned alive by Hamas – “because she’s
Jewish,” former prime minister Naftali Bennett
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/naftali-bennett> lied.

Last month The Electronic Intifada also reported on an Israeli air force
colonel
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/we-blew-israeli-houses-7-october-says-israeli-colonel>
who admitted that 7 October was a “mass Hannibal” event and that their
drones had blown up Israeli homes that day.

Bergman and Zitun explain that the original Hannibal Directive was secretly
established in 1986 after the capture of two Israeli soldiers in
then-occupied southern Lebanon by Lebanese resistance organization Hizballah
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/hizballah>.

Their new article says that the original Hannibal Directive ordered Israeli
forces to “halt the capturing force at any price” and that “in the course
of a capture, the main task becomes rescuing our soldiers from the captors,
even at the price of hitting or injuring our soldiers.”

Two years after it was exposed by journalists during the 2014 war on Gaza,
the doctrine was allegedly revoked, or at least
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-chief-puts-an-end-to-contentious-hannibal-protocol/>
“clarified.” But Bergman and Zitun confirm in their new article that at
midday on 7 October, the Israeli military “decided to return to a version
of the Hannibal Directive.”

They write 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, despite repeated promises by the defense
apparatus that the directive had been canceled.”

The new article explains that headquarters ordered all units to carry out
the Hannibal Directive soon after the first videos of the Israeli captives
emerged.
“Fire at will”

Since 7 October, there has been a steadily growing stream of evidence
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/evidence-israel-killed-its-own-citizens-7-october/41156>
suggesting that Israel may have been responsible for large numbers of
Israeli civilian deaths that day – plausibly even the majority of them
given the latest revelations.

This evidence has been studiously ignored by mainstream media in the West.

It has been reported on in English by independent media, including The
Electronic Intifada, *The Grayzone*, *The Cradle* and *Mondoweiss*.

The first two of these publications are even the subject of a planned hit
piece by *The Washington Post*, precisely for their factual reporting of 7
October events.

Last month the Israeli military admitted
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/israel-admits-immense-amount-friendly-fire-7-october>
that an “immense and complex quantity” of what it called “friendly fire”
incidents took place on 7 October.

There was therefore every indication before this new article that Israel
had secretly reactivated the Hannibal Directive – as reported by The
Electronic Intifada since 7 October.

But Bergman and Zitun’s new article is the first time it has been confirmed
that the orders to do so came from the very top of Israel’s military
hierarchy.

Nonetheless, it seems that even before midday, in the morning of the brutal
and indiscriminate Israeli reaction to the Palestinian military assault,
local officers took matters into their own hands and decided to reactivate
Hannibal themselves.

At around 8 am drone squadron 161 decided “that there is no point for them
to wait for orders from the Air Force Command or from the Gaza Division.”
The division headquarters in the settlement of Re’im was at that moment
under fierce attack by Palestinian fighters. Nonetheless, the squadron
managed to reach them and asked “that all procedures, orders, and
regulations be tossed in the trash,” Bergman and Zitun recount.

The reply came from division command: “You have authority to fire at will.”

Acting on the orders of young officers from the so-called “Fire Canopy” mobile
command center
<https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel/diplomacy-defense/111798-160502-israel-s-canopy-of-fire>,
attack helicopter pilots were also told: “You have permission [to open
fire] until further notice – and throughout the entire area.”

The article also reveals the fact that dozens of operatives from Israel’s
domestic torture and assassination secret police agency the Shin Bet
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/shin-bet> took part in the battles of
7 October.

Director Ronen Bar personally ordered “anyone who can carry a weapon” to
mobilize, saying that “all employees with combat training who had weapons
[should] go south and help in the fighting.”

According to the article, 10 Shin Bet operatives were killed that day.

If this is accurate, it’s likely that another 10 of the civilians named as
Israeli casualties were armed Shin Bet officers.

The casualties database
<https://www.haaretz.com/haaretz-explains/2023-10-19/ty-article-magazine/israels-dead-the-names-of-those-killed-in-hamas-massacres-and-the-israel-hamas-war/0000018b-325c-d450-a3af-7b5cf0210000>
maintained by Israeli newspaper *Haaretz* as of this writing still names
three of these Shin Bet officers as Yossi Tahar, Smadar Mor Idan and Omer
Gvera.

Idan is characterized as a “civilian” while Tahar and Gvera are listed only
as part of the “emergency services.” All three are also categorized as
“Victims of October 7.”

Bergman and Zitun’s article seems to be causing waves in Israeli society,
where the families of the remaining Israeli captives held in Gaza are
trying to pressure the government to agree to a prisoner exchange deal with
Hamas.

Bergman is a particularly high profile Israeli journalist. As well as *Yedioth
Ahronoth*, he writes <https://www.nytimes.com/by/ronen-bergman> for the *New
York Times Magazine* and is the author of several sympathetic books about
Israeli spy agencies, including *Rise and Kill First*.

Speaking to
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-01-17/ty-article/.premium/unlawful-unethical-horrifying-idf-ethics-expert-on-controversial-hannibal-directive/0000018d-186c-dd75-addd-faedd2b80000>
the *Haaretz* podcast this week, Asa Kasher, the author of the Israeli
army’s code of “ethics” joined the chorus calling for an investigation into
the use of the Hannibal doctrine on and soon after 7 October.

“Kasher stridently agreed with the families that an investigation is needed
immediately,” wrote *Haaretz*, and that this should not wait until the end
of the war in Gaza.

Yet Kasher is anything but an ethical voice. “Killing 40 civilians” in Gaza
in one go is “reasonable,” he told The Electronic Intifada in 2014
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/killing-40-civilians-one-go-reasonable-says-israel-army-ethicist>
.

*With translation by Dena Shunra.*
Full translated article

*The Black Time*

By Ronen Bergman and Yoav Zitun

Published by <https://w.ynet.co.il/yediot/7-days/time-of-darkness> *Yedioth
Ahronoth’s* weekend supplement *7 Days*, 12 January 2024.

*Translation by Dena Shunra for The Electronic Intifada, based on the print
edition.*

On the morning of October 7th some of the most impressive tales of heroism
and self-sacrifice in the history of the country were written, but so too
was a long series of failures, mishaps, and chaos in the army. This *7 Days*
investigation sketches the first hours of the Black Sabbath and exposes:
the command bunker underneath the Kirya [in Tel Aviv] were in the blind and
had to obtain their updates from the Hamas Telegram channels. The Southern
Command published antiquated and irrelevant orders. The IDF decided to
apply a directive similar to the Hannibal Directive, in the course of which
they also shot at vehicles that may have been carrying captives. Commando
fighters went out into the field without sights on their weapons and
without bullet-proof vests. And that’s only the beginning. The IDF
Spokesman: “The IDF will conduct a detailed in-depth investigation.”

* * *

On the night of October 7th, while Hamas was already doing last minute
preparations for the attack planned for the morning, senior figures in the
Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) and the IDF were having a few conference
calls. The main reason for these calls was that a short time after
midnight, the Israeli intelligence community started picking up some
significant indications. These indications came after some earlier
indications that had started blinking in the days and weeks beforehand.

The problem with these indications was that none of them constituted a
clear alert for war: they might mean battle footing, but they also might
mean training that simulates battle footing. Some of these signals had
already been received in the past, and had indeed led to training maneuvers.

But the accumulation of all of these together evoked a certain degree of
concern in the high echelons of the security apparatus, and the heads of
the military and the Shin Bet called each other for consultation. The head
of the Shin Bet, Ronen Bar, came to its headquarters in person, and the
Commander of the Southern Command abandoned a weekend getaway and started
driving south. At around three or four in the morning, Bar instructed the
Tequila Squad, a special intervention force of the Shin Bet and the Yamam
counter terror unit, to head south. This was a highly exceptional step,
meant for a scenario of an infiltration by several individual squads of
terrorists via one or two breakthrough points for the purpose of murdering
or capturing citizens and soldiers.

But despite the concerns, a senior intelligence figure determined at 3:10
am that “we still believe that Sinwar is not pivoting towards an
escalation,” in other words, this is apparently another Hamas training.

These signals also caused concern to the commander of the Gaza Division,
the military unit in charge of protecting the frontline at the border
between Israel and the Gaza Strip, Brigadier General Avi Rosenfeld, who was
the division’s commander on duty that weekend. He decided to alert his
senior commanders, including the commanders of the two regional brigades –
northern and southern – and the division’s intelligence office, its
military engineering officer, and others. When they arrived at their
command center at the Re’im base, they started taking some steps to
heighten the level of alertness on the border.

According to some of the senior figures in the Southern Command, the
division commander and his officers were planning to take additional steps
to increase alertness in the division’s bases and outposts along the border
and near the settlements that they were supposed to protect, but due to the
information that had initially evoked the concerns, They were asked by
figures at IDF command headquarters not to take “noisy” steps. On the other
hand, other figures in the security apparatus say the division command
could have taken many steps that would not have been registered on the
other side.

Deep underneath the Kirya building in Tel-Aviv, in a place that is
officially called Mizpeh (IDF Supreme Command Position) but which everyone
just calls “the Pit,” first updates about the indications were received.
Consequently, the head of the Southern Arena in the Operations Department
was urgently summoned to the Pit, in order for a senior officer to be
present with the authority to give significant orders. Around 4:00 am, this
officer instructed the Air Force to get one more “Zik” [Elbit Hermes 450]
unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) into a state of readiness. But this was an
unarmed Zik, solely for reconnaissance purposes, and this step also
indicated concern only about localized intrusion.

But the concerning signals kept piling up, and eventually, a few minutes
before 6:30 am, a decision was made in a conversation between the Shin Bet
and the IDF to call the encrypted phone of the Prime Minister’s military
secretary, Major General Avi Gil, to inform him about developments and
propose that the Prime Minister be woken up. Gil told the senior
intelligence officer who had contacted him that he would call Netanyahu
immediately, but while they were still talking, alarm sirens started to be
heard around Israel. The clock at the Pit showed 6:26 am Gil and the senior
intelligence officer immediately realized that given the hour and the
extent of the attack, this was an event of a different order of magnitude,
different and more aggressive, since Hamas knew that shooting thousands of
missiles and rockets would lead to an Israeli response. None of them knew
just how different and aggressive this would be.

Prime Minister Netanyahu was informed of the events while the sirens were
sounding, and it was decided that he would come to the Kirya immediately.
At the Pit, the following and most critical hours were very confused,
shrouded in fog of war and lack of information. “An overview of the
situation is the most important element for a war room like the Pit,” said
a senior figure, who has spent years with products coming from the IDF
command bunker. “The Pit itself was functioning and gave an almost
immediate order to many forces to head out, but when you don’t know exactly
where to send them or with what equipment and who and where and how large
the enemy is that they will meet at the other side, you are doomed to pay
dearly for your blindness.”

And indeed, no one in the Pit actually knew much at all. So there was an
almost total shock in the Pit when a senior officer said a few words, the
likes of which had not been heard since the “Yom Kippur” [October] War [of
1973]: “The Gaza Division was overpowered.”

Silence fell in the room that was filled with technology and giant blinking
screens. “These words still give me the chills,” said a person who heard
them then and there. “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,
and this will remain a scar burnt into our flesh forever.”

* * *

In those hours, in the burning security rooms of Nir Oz and Be’eri and in
the outdoor shelters at the Re’im party, in the locked homes in Sderot and
Ofakim, on blood-stained road 232, and in fact, throughout the country, one
questioned echoed everywhere: where is the IDF?

And this is the question at the heart of this investigation: where was the
Israel Defense Force in the first hours of the morning of October 7th?

Over the past months we have spoken to dozens of officers and commanders,
some of whom hold very senior positions in the IDF. We tried to use their
stories and internal security documents to sketch out what really happened
in the first hours of that morning, to draw a timeline of the hours that
changed the country forever.

We will say it straight away: On this Black Sabbath there was a lot of
initiative, a lot of courage, a lot of self-sacrifice. Civilians, soldiers
and officers, police and Shin Bet personnel leaped into battle arenas at
their own initiative; they acquired weapons, received partial information,
engaged in complex warfare, and sometimes gave their lives. They wrote some
of the most beautiful and heroic chapters in the history of Israel. But the *7
Days* investigation exposes the fact that along with these, in those same
hours, some of the hardest, most embarrassing and infuriating chapters in
the history of the army were also written. This includes a command chain
that failed almost entirely and was entirely blindsided; orders to open
fire on terrorist vehicles speeding towards Gaza even as was a concern that
they contained captives – some sort of renewed version of the Hannibal
Directive; fighters who – due to lack of communications – had to direct
aerial support using their cell phones; war reserve stores that sent
fighters into battle with weapons that lacked gunsights and without
bullet-proof vests; outdated and inappropriate orders that were copy-pasted
and sent out to the battlefield; warplanes roaming the air in the critical
moments of the attack without guidance; officers coming to the conclusion
that there was no alternative to acquiring helicopters in a roundabout way
in order to move their forces from place to place; and even unmanned
aircraft operators who had to join the kibbutz WhatsApp groups in order to
let besieged civilians help them to build a list of targets. And everything
was so crazy, chaotic, improvised, and haphazard that you have to read it
to believe that this is what actually happened. And no, we don’t have to
wait for an official commission of inquiry that will surely be established
and will surely deal with everything that we have laid out here: some
things need to be corrected here and now.

This is what it looked like, hour by hour, on that terrible morning:

*6:26*

Massive shooting of missiles and rockets. The Hamas attack begins.

*6:30*

Other than Iron Dome, which was put into action immediately, the first
military response by the IDF was to mobilize a pair of F-16I (Sufa) planes
from combat squadron 107 at the Hatzerim air base, which was on
interception alert that Saturday. Quite a few complaints were heard about
the sparse and confused Air Force response in the morning of Black Sabbath.
Some complaints are appropriate: the *7 Days* investigation finds that even
the force that is considered the most orderly and best organized in the IDF
had a very hard time understanding the magnitude of the event, and the
response given, at least in the first few hours, was partial and sparse.

On their way, the pilots and navigators of the Sufa planes saw the
contrails of the many rockets on their way into Israel, but under the
orders, the role of the first interceptors rising into the air is to
protect strategic military and civilian assets. In the first few hours
there was no one to change that order and direct the planes to the attacked
regions where they were truly needed, and from 20,000 feet high it is
almost impossible to identify targets without ground assistance. Thus it
happened that for about 45 critical minutes, armed fighter planes flew
circles in the sky without taking any action. It was only around eight
o’clock, when the pilots landed and received reports from the ground, that
they learned what had happened just a few kilometers away. Their
frustration and rage were immense. “If they knew, they could at least have
flown at low elevation in order to scare the Hamas terrorists by flying
loudly over their heads,” said a senior flight squadron officer. “But they
just did not know what was happening.” One way or another, these pilots
took off again, with their peers, primarily in order to attack targets in
Gaza.

A few minutes after the F-16 planes took off, a pair of Squadron 140 F-35
(Adir model) stealth planes took off from Nevatim base that had been on
call as well. Their pilots did not know what was happening on the ground
either, despite the fact that in their case, they managed to fly at a lower
altitude and identify fires in the Gaza Envelope region. In response, the
pilots acted in accordance with a contingency plan for attacking targets in
Gaza. There was no one to tell them that these attacks were ineffective now
and that they were needed somewhere completely different at this time.

*6:37*

Two armed Zik UAVs were taken from Squadron 161 at the Palmachim base,
which was on alert that Saturday. This was in direct response to the “Code
Red” sirens a few minutes after they were sounded. In the subsequent hours,
the Zik operators had to improvise and operate independently. Neither they
nor the Air Force Central Command were able to understand the full picture.
One way or the other, as happened a lot that Saturday, officers on the
ground initiated steps on their own, and the squadron did not wait for a
proper order and instructed three more armed Ziks to take to the skies and
go into battle.

*6:50*

A little before 7:00 am, the first pair of Apache helicopters was also sent
to the Gaza Envelope. The two Apache gunboats belong to Flight Squadron
190, whose home base is Ramon, a 20-minute flight from the Gaza Strip.
However, due to budget cuts in previous years, the helicopters were at the
Ramat David base in the north near Lebanon that Saturday, a flight distance
that left many minutes without air cover in the Gaza Envelope region.

In recent years, the Air Force has diluted its helicopter gunship inventory
under the theory that against Iran, Israel would need more stealth planes
and fewer of these “flying tanks.” October 7th is supposed to change this
understanding, too.

*7:00*

Around 6:45 am, the first conversation was held between the Pit and a
Southern Command operations officer, in which the General Staff was first
informed that this was not only rocket fire but that there were also
breaches of the fence, and that some of the observation infrastructure was
damaged. This was one of the reasons that the Pit was left de facto
blindsided: the three large observation balloons that were supposed to
provide observation points towards the southern, central, and northern Gaza
Strip, had fallen during the days prior to the attack. Hamas also directly
targeted cameras and other observation infrastructure, among other things
using “suicide UAVs.”

But it was not only the observation infrastructure that was impacted. A
preliminary investigation held in the last few days about the communication
capacity of the Gaza Division exposed the fact that some 40 percent of the
communication sites such as towers with relay antennas that the
Telecommunications Department had deployed in recent years near the Gaza
Strip border were destroyed by Hamas in the morning of the invasion. Thus,
the [Hamas] Nukhba Force [Editor’s note: “nukhba” is Arabic for “elite”]
did not only directly damage the “see and shoot” Raphael tower systems and
the observation infrastructure along the fence, but also attempted to
tamper with the basic radio communication capabilities. The terrorists also
placed explosive devices near the tower bases at the lower part of the
antennas, places that were apparently unprotected against this type of
attack. These explosions were partially successful: some of the towers
fell, others just tilted.

In the Pit at the Kirya, attempts were made to obtain reports from the Gaza
Division war room, but as previously mentioned, that war room was almost
entirely blind, and furthermore, just before 7:00 am, a fierce attack was
launched in Re’im by terrorists who had entered the Division’s Command
Base. The Division’s war room was staffed and operational, but found it
very difficult to fulfill its primary purposes: to receive information
about the current situation on the ground, to mobilize forces accordingly,
and to inform the Southern Command and the Pit at the Kirya about new
developments.

The result was that a short time after the attack began, the Pit at the
Kirya put into operation some permanent preliminary orders for the event of
a suspected infiltration from Gaza. These procedures still reflected the
thought that the attack was occurring at one or at a few spots, and that it
was of limited scope. A military officer who was present at the Tel Aviv
command bunker during those hours relates that it was understood in the Pit
that a much more significant event was occurring than a spot infiltration,
but that due to the blindness on the ground, they turned to television and
to social media feeds, primarily to Telegram, to Israeli channels, but
primarily to Hamas channels, which included texts, pictures, and videos of
the events. From these they came to the understanding that the incident was
expansive, but they still had difficulty forming an overall picture of
everything that was happening. This moment, in which the Pit, the holy of
holies of Israeli security, remained clueless and resorted to surfing Hamas
Telegram feeds in order to understand what was happening inside the State
of Israel, is a moment that will not soon be forgotten.

One may learn just how complete the mess was, for example, from the
experiences of the Duvdevan fighters during those hours. On that weekend,
Duvdevan was actually on alert for a hostage-taking situation, but they
were doing so far away in the Judea and Samaria Region [the West Bank].
Around 7:00 am, the commander of Duvdevan, Lieutenant Colonel D, received a
phone call. The call was not an official call, but rather a call from a
friend, an officer at Southern Command, who told him with some alarm about
what was going on in his sector. D. did not waste time and called his
company from the Judea and Samaria Region and instructed them to arm
themselves, get into the unit’s vehicles, and hurry toward the Gaza
Envelope region. No new information arrived while they were on their way
about being ambushed at road intersections, simply because there was no one
to provide such information. But by sheer good luck, D. identified a
Savannah vehicle of an unarmored variety belonging to the Tequila unit,
which had previously been sprayed with bullets, and he halted the convoy.
He instructed his people to leave all regular vehicles, converge into the
armored jeeps, circumvented the intersection, and entered the battle at
Kfar Azza.

They did not leave until 60 consecutive hours and dozens of killed
terrorists later. Incidentally, the commander of another Duvdevan company,
who was trying to find a way to get his men to the Gaza Envelope region and
did not get any responses from the command, simply called a good friend in
the Air Force and finagled a helicopter that would transport his men to
combat at Nir Yitzchak.

*7:14*

The Gaza Division managed to convey a request to the Zik squadron: to
attack at the Erez Crossing. The UAV operators saw unbelievable images on
their screens: the crossing had become a bustling highway for terrorists.
Operators told us that at least in the first two hours, their feelings were
of loss of control, and in many cases they independently took decisions to
attack. By that end of that accursed day, the squadron performed no fewer
than 110 attacks on some 1,000 targets, most of which were inside Israel.

Throughout this entire mess, the operators were required to be on increased
alert: *7 Days* was informed of at least one critical instance when an
officer fighting near the Nir Am kibbutz identified five terrorists on
their way from a nearby grove of trees, heading toward Sderot. The officer
managed to make contact with the Zik operators and directed them to the
squad. The UAV operator had already locked in on the target, but from his
portable at Palmachim he identified that these were not terrorists in
disguise but rather five IDF soldiers, surveying the place. They were the
press of a button away from a certain death.

*7:30*

The two Apache helicopters that had taken off from Ramat David arrived in
the Be’eri region and reported to the squadron about a mess and mushroom
clouds of smoke. The commander of Squadron 190, Lieutenant Colonel A,
decided to call his second in command and ordered all pilots to arrive
quickly from their homes, even before he was ordered to do so by the
operations headquarters of the Air Force. The pair of Apache helicopters
over Be’eri started to perform fire for isolation outside the kibbutzim in
order to prevent the arrival of additional terrorists.

Meanwhile, the battle for the Re’im Base, where the headquarters of the
Gaza Division is located, continued in full force, and dozens of terrorists
were attacking the compound. The Division commander, Brigadier General Avi
Rosenfeld, managed to enter the fortified war room with many of his
soldiers, from where he attempted to direct both the division’s battle and
the battle for the base, concurrently. According to the testimony of a
female officer, Rosenfeld himself wished to leave the war room and attack.
But outside, the Nukhba’s advance fire teams were everywhere. Only at 1:00
pm would fighters from “Shaldag” Unit 5101 and other units manage to
reoccupy the base, with assistance of a helicopter gunship.

All this made what the IDF calls a “command and control” very difficult. If
the Division Headquarters is blindsided and under attack, the Southern
Command Headquarters does not receive sufficient information either, nor
does the command bunker at the Kirya. The result was that commanders who
had already learned from the media or from friends that something was going
on and had scrambled to get to the Gaza Envelope, received no response from
their superiors. “I came with my private vehicle to the Yad Mordechai
junction after I saw on the news at home the video of the Nukhba terrorists
on a pick-up truck in Sderot,” relates a brigade commander in regular
service. “During the entire drive I tried to get in touch with my friends
at the Gaza Division and at the Southern Command in order to understand
where it would be best for me to go first, and to hear from them what was
happening on the ground and where I should send my soldiers. When they
finally picked up, I heard mostly shouting on the other side of the line,
and when I asked for something as elementary as a description of the
current situation, the Gaza Division told me: ‘we do not have a description
of the current situation. Find a focal point of fighting and you tell us
what the situation is.’ And here I am, coming from home, my brigade is
dispersed throughout other sectors or is exercising in the north, and like
many others, I can already see terrorists at Erez crossing, and I am
certain that the incident is right where I am.” By the way, that feeling,
that every commander thought that the focal combat was happening right
where he was without knowing that a few kilometers away, his colleague was
fighting a similar battle, was common to many of the officers we spoke
with. None of them knew that in fact, in those hours, there were some 80
different points of combat.

*7:43*

According to a Southern Command officer, it was only around 7:30 am, more
than an hour after the attack began, that the Commander of the Gaza
Division, Brigadier General Avi Rosenfeld called the Pit in Tel Aviv and
reported that the Division’s base in Re’im and the entire area were under
heavy attack. He reported that he could not yet describe the scope and
details of the attack, and asked the commander on call to send him all
available IDF forces.

At 7:43 the Command in Tel Aviv issued the Pleshet Order: The first order
to deploy forces, according to which all emergency forces and all units
near the Gaza border region must head south immediately. [Translator’s
note: Pleshet – פלשת – is a play on words. It is the Biblical name of
Palestine, and uses the verb root for invasion: פ.ל.ש.] However, the order
did not mention what was not clear at all, neither at the Southern Command
nor in the Pit in Tel Aviv, that this was a broad invasion, whose goal was
to occupy parts of the south of the country and included taking over
junctions for ambushes and to neutralize reinforcements. The result was
that a significant part of the forces that headed out did not know that
there was a risk of running into enemy forces while they were still on
their way to the settlement or base that they were sent to.

There was another problem with the Pleshet Order: it was actually intended
to protect Israel from a completely different type of incursion. Until the
establishment of “the barrier,” the main threat had been the intrusion of
terrorists into Israel via a network of penetrative tunnels, from which
they would attempt to reach the settlements. The Pleshet Order was phrased
to protect against this type of threat, and it focused on regions inside
Israel, such that terrorists who would emerge from tunnels inside Israel
would be neutralized. In other words, the order did not focus on protecting
the border fence against infiltration by Hamas terrorists who would have to
operate above ground, nor on the threat of thousands of terrorists flowing
into Israel almost freely, through more than 30 breakthrough points. The
IDF had not imagined such a scenario, and did not prepare orders for it.
This failure is even stranger, as the IDF had obtained Hamas’ “Jericho
Wall” battle plan that described exactly this kind of attack, and yet did
not cancel the Pleshet order or update its defense plans.

*8:00*

The General Staff gathered around 8:00 am in the new operations pit at the
Kirya in Tel Aviv, and Chief of Staff Herzl “Herzi” Halevi arrived. No one
understood that for an hour and a half already, Israel had been under a
full-blown attack by Hamas.

*8:10*

The officers of the UAV squadron understand that there is no point for them
to wait for orders from the Air Force Command or from the Gaza Division.
They manage to get in touch with the Division and essentially ask that all
procedures, orders, and regulations be tossed in the trash. “You have
authority to fire at will,” the Zik operators were told by the Division. In
other words: shoot at anything that looks threatening or like an enemy.

But whom to attack? Without an orderly command, the UAV operators tried to
build a “target bank” on their own. Improvisation swiftly took over here,
too: most operators are young officers who have friends and relatives
fighting on the ground at that very moment. It was decided to trash another
iron rule: never let a cell phone into the operations portable. The
operators made regular phone calls with their peers on the ground: “You see
that building with the dark roof? So, the tower next to it” to guide them.
And at the most extreme, other operators joined the Whatsapp groups of
Kibbutz Kfar Azza and other settlements and were told what to target by
besieged civilians.

*8:32*

The two lone Apache helicopters in the air, which were operating on their
own initiative until now, managed to make initial radio contact with the
commander of one of the companies on the ground. This contact, which is so
necessary for the air forces to receive a situation update from the ground
forces and be directed to the target, only formed about an hour and a half
from the beginning of the attack. The company commander asked for fire for
his benefit, and received it. After the shooting, the Apache pilots pointed
the helicopters to the west, and an alarming sight becomes visible: a
tremendous river of human beings, flowing through the gaps toward the
settlements of the south. It would later become clear that this was the
second wave of invaders – the first wave had consisted mostly of Nukhba and
Palestinian Jihad terrorists – and this second wave also included armed
civilians and tens of thousands of looters.

The pilot decided to shoot two missiles at the armed persons, as well as
dozens of shells from the helicopter’s cannon, indiscriminately, in order
to chase them back to Gaza. Later the helicopters noticed a large gap in
the border fence near Nahal Oz and attacked the multitudes who were
crossing through it. In both cases the success was limited, simply because
there were too many terrorists and two few shells: each helicopter carries
six missiles and 500 canon shells. The two helicopters were forced to leave
in order to rearm themselves, and returned to the base around 10:20 am

*8:58*

Additional Apache helicopters took flight, this time from Ramon base, and
operated mostly in the regions where there were breaches of the fence. This
would be their primary activity until noon. The Air Force was still
confused and affected by the fog of war. “Shoot anyone who intrudes in our
space, without [waiting for] authorization,” squadron commander Lieutenant
Colonel A told his subordinates in the air, while he himself took off for
the Gaza Envelope. One of the helicopters was damaged by small arms fire,
but continued fighting.

*9:00*

Ronen Bar, the director of Shin Bet, instructed his people: anyone who can
carry a weapon must go south. During the previous night, as mentioned, Bar
had received several signals of an event happening in the Gaza Strip
region, but he thought that even if Hamas was planning something, it would
be a limited and localized action, so he only sent the Tequila Force. The
Tequila Force fighters were some of the first to encounter the infiltrating
terrorists, fought them bravely, and managed to report to Shin Bet
headquarters. But even at that time, neither the Shin Bet nor [the
generals] in the Pit under the Kirya understood that the attack was, in
fact, extensive. It was only around 9:00 am, when reports from his
subordinates were confirmed by other reports and by media coverage, that
Bar instructed all employees with combat training who had weapons to go
south and help in the fighting. According to a person familiar with the
events of that morning, people who went down to the ground included
coordinators, combat school trainers, security detail bodyguards, people
who secure facilities and people who secure on-the-ground actions. In
total, dozens of Shin Bet employees were involved, who killed dozens of
terrorists and rescued hundreds of residents of the Gaza Envelope region.
Shin Bet combatants who live in the settlements in the south went out to
fight even before the instruction was given, and thereafter joined the
other forces who arrived in the area. In the course of the fighting, ten of
the organization’s people were killed.

*9:30*

While many reinforcements were flowing south, it was not yet understood at
the Gaza Division, at the Southern Command and at the Pit in Tel Aviv that
the Nukhba terrorists had foreseen these reinforcements and took over the
strategic junctions such as Gama, Magen, Ein Habesor, and Shaar Hanegev,
where they awaited the forces. The expected order to secure the
intersections before the arrival of reinforcements had not yet come down,
and a lot of blood was shed at those junctions, both of soldiers and of
civilians.

But there were some who had understood. Battalion 450 of the platoon
commander training school was on call for the Gaza Division that Saturday,
and battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Ran Canaan mobilized his
fighters from the base near Yerucham relatively early in the morning. The
battalion was told that it was going to the Gaza Envelope region, but it
was not alerted about intersections on the way having become places for
deadly ambushes. Some 50 fighters got onto a regular bus with full
equipment and headed out. Suddenly, between Tze’elim and Kerem Shalom, the
driver slammed his brakes for an emergency stop. Some policemen approached
the bus, waving their hands. Some were injured. They told the company
commander with great alarm that at the next junction, about three
kilometers away from them, terrorists were waiting for them, with a heavy
machine gun and anti-tank weapons. The force commander understood that a
machine gun volley against the sides of the unarmored bus would make it a
death trap for his soldiers. “The Nukhba deployed squads at the junctions
on the way to the Gaza Envelope, with RPG teams, snipers, machine guns, and
immense amounts of ammunition, for long hours of combat,” said Lieutenant
Colonel Canaan, who was wounded in the battles and returned to combat after
some days had passed. “The company commander took a decision: continue
toward the Gaza Envelope region on foot and leave the bus behind. Everyone
went off and proceeded on foot, so the bus was not hit by an anti-tank
missile or by machine gun fire. The fighters went around the intersections
and secured them, cleared the bridge over the Besor creek that the
terrorists had taken over, and they did all this on foot, for kilometers on
end.”

Around 9:30, the besieged Gaza Division eventually managed to man and
operate the Hupat Esh [Fire Canopy] attack cell. [Editor’s note: This is a
secretive mobile command room according to Israeli press reports
<https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel/diplomacy-defense/111798-160502-israel-s-canopy-of-fire>.]
This is a system established by Chief of Staff Kohavi and which operates in
the division. The idea is that one place will hold intelligence about
targets, control and planning about attacking them, and the corresponding
operation of aerial forces. Thus, a single Hupat Esh attack cell could, for
example, shoot down an incendiary balloon or execute an aerial attack on a
mortar shell launching unit. But the Hupat Esh system was never designed to
cope with such an insane amount of targets simultaneously.

The officers faced dilemmas of life and death: where should they direct the
helicopter gunships and the Zik first? To the dozens of breaches in the
fence, through which the terrorists continued to arrive? To the posts
currently occupied by the Nukhba terrorists, where they were killing
hundreds of soldiers and taking others as captives back into Gaza? Or
should it be in the direction of Sderot, or the Kibbutzim, where the
civilians were being brutalized? Eventually, the Hupat Esh attack cell
commanders, some of whom were 22 years old, sent the Apache pilots a
command that has never appeared in any standing order: “You have permission
until further notice – and throughout the entire area.”

A similar mechanism of deploying firepower was also started in the course
of the morning at the Southern Command headquarters in Beer Sheva. An
experienced officer, in the sixth decade of his life, arrived at the
command from his home in the north around sunset, and stood shocked before
the screens, flickering with targets. “We prepared and exercised for many
scenarios of infiltration from Gaza,” he told *7 Days*. But If the officer
from the training administration at headquarters would have written a
scenario like the one that happened on October 7th for an upcoming
exercise, we would have hospitalized them at a psychiatric institute
immediately.”

*10:00*

The fighting on the ground intensified and drew casualties. In many cases
the fighters had to collect intelligence on their own in order to get their
bearings. The commander of Division 36, Brigadier General Dado Bar Khalifa,
for instance, did not wait for orders and rushed directly from his home to
the site and arrived at Netiv Haasara around 10:00 am. He took a gun, a
bullet-proof vest and a helmet from one of the injured policemen. Then he
photographed some of the Nukhba terrorists that he had neutralized in order
to send these photographs to the intelligence entities and refrained from
killing some of them intentionally. Bar Khalifa caught two of them
veritably by physically beating them in the fields between Yad Mordechai
and the occupied Erez Post, undressed them to ascertain that they were not
carrying explosive charges, and started interrogating them on the spot.
>From this interrogation, which was done under fire, Bar Khalifa learned
about the directions of the Nukhba invasion, where some of their people
were hiding in ambush, and in general, about the scope of the event, at
least in the northern part of the sector, near Sderot. Apparently, at this
point he knew a lot more than what they knew in the Pit.

*11:30*

Like other combat brigades, Brigade 890 also mobilized from its Nabi Mussa
base near Jerusalem at 7:00 am and headed in the direction of the Gaza
Envelope. Some of the brigade fighters arrived for the fighting at Kibbutz
Be’eri. Meanwhile brigade commander Lieutenant Colonel Yoni Hacohen managed
to finagle a Sikorsky CH-53 Sea Stallion “Yasur” helicopter to bring a few
dozen of his fighters to the area. At 11:30, a moment before landing near
Kibbutz Alumim, the helicopter was directly hit by an RPG from the ground –
quite a rare occurrence – but before it went up in flames, the pilot
managed to land it safely, and the warriors disembarked and directly
entered the battle in the kibbutz.

The battles they took part in, some of which in the constructed area, made
the 890 unit fighters very much regret that they had arrived without
fragmentation grenades. Other brigades also did not receive this important
weapon. The reason: the IDF has a policy of storing grenades in bunkers for
sound reasons of safety. When do they distribute them? Only during relevant
exercises or for operations in enemy territory. When forces are mobilized
on short notice, their chance of receiving grenades is not high.

Lack of combat equipment or inappropriate equipment was a complaint made by
many of the officers and ground personnel that we talked to. It may be
understandable why the emergency reserve storehouses were not ready to
equip fighters in the south who had arrived from the north, but here is a
story of a reservist battalion from Division 98, a select commando unit.
One might have assumed that for this sort of battalion, which would clearly
spearhead any fighting, everything would be prepared in advance. But no.
Fighters who managed to reach the emergency reserve storehouses late in the
morning commented about missing equipment. “Of course the weapons had not
been calibrated, and for a few hours we were shooting in the Gaza Envelope
region without hitting any terrorists,” one of the fighters related. “Our
marksmen went without the sights assembled onto the weapons, and then there
were the bullet-proof vests. At least one of the guys was killed that
Saturday when a bullet hit his stomach because he didn’t have such a vest.”

And, by the way, the infantry fighters were not the only ones suffering a
lack of equipment. The armored corps also discovered this very quickly. For
example, the reservists from Division 252 were mobilized relatively early
on Saturday morning, but when they reached their supply center in Tze’elim,
where they found that the first tanks available to them were Merkava III
tanks – and even these were not in an impressively well-maintained
condition, some of them being more than 20 years old. But they did not have
many choices, so they got into the Merkava tanks, prayed that the engines
would start, and raced along the roads towards the Gaza Envelope. These
tanks were some of the first to report what no one in the command centers
had managed to understand yet: that the Nukhba terrorists had built
ambushes at key points in order to attack reinforcement units.

*11:59*

The chaos and confusion continued for many long hours. In the status
evaluation coming up to noon, the Southern Command already understood that
their assessment up until that morning, according to which Hamas did not
have the capacity to penetrate “the barrier” except maybe at one or two
points, had entirely collapsed, and that Hamas had managed to penetrate at
more than 30 points (see the map of penetration points on these pages.)
[Editor’s note: The map shows 48 red dots on the fence around Gaza with the
legend: “breakthrough location in the fence/gate broken.”]

Even almost six hours after the fact, the fog covering that status
evaluation was immense. Headquarters did not understand what Hamas’ goals
were, where their forces were deployed and how they operate, the control of
intersections, the concurrent attacks on posts and on civilian settlements.
At that time, Headquarters believed that they could regain control over the
entire south of the country by dark. In practice this would take another
three days, and even then, the area would not be fully cleared of Hamas
people.

But in the meanwhile, the first videos about captives started coming in,
and Headquarters also understood that at least in this respect, this was
now a completely different event. This was the moment at which the IDF
decided to return to a version of the Hannibal Directive.

In 1986, after the capture and murder of two IDF soldiers by Hizballah, the
IDF introduced a new, secret, and controversial directive. Under the “Task”
section, it included the statement that “Immediate location of a ‘Hannibal’
incident, delay/halt the capturing force at any price and release the
captives.” The original command stated that “In the course of a capture,
the main task becomes rescuing our soldiers from the captors, even at the
price of hitting or injuring our soldiers.” According to publications, the
order was changed in 2016, softened, and had its name changed. Its current
language has not been published, but a clarification was introduced that
actions must be avoided that would be highly likely to endanger the
captive’s life.

The *7 Days* investigation shows that at midday of October 7th, the IDF
instructed all its fighting units to perform the Hannibal Directive in
practice, although it did so without stating that name explicitly. 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, despite repeated promises by the defense apparatus that
the directive had been canceled.

In practice, the meaning of the order is that the primary goal was to stop
the retreat of the Nukhba operatives. And if they took captives with them
as hostages, then to do so even if this means the endangerment or harming
of the lives of civilians in the region, including the captives themselves.

According to several testimonies, the Air Force operated during those hours
under an instruction to prevent movement from Gaza into Israel and return
from Israel into Gaza. Estimates say that in the area between the Gaza
Envelope settlements and the Gaza Strip, some one thousand terrorists and
infiltrators were killed. It is not clear at this stage how many of the
captives were killed due to the operation of this order on October 7th.
During the week after Black Sabbath and at the initiative of Southern
Command, soldiers from elite units examined some 70 vehicles that had
remained in the area between the Gaza Envelope settlements and the Gaza
Strip. These were vehicles that did not reach Gaza because on their way
they had been hit by fire from a helicopter gunship, a UAV or a tank, and
at least in some of the cases, everyone in the vehicle was killed.

*12:30*

Around noon that Saturday, about six hours after the Hamas attack began,
due to the partial information, the IDF still estimated that only about 200
Nukhba terrorists had infiltrated into Israel, while the actual number was
nearly ten times larger. *7 Days* has discovered that at this stage the IDF
was still using the status evaluations in the battle plan prepared at
Southern Command, although it was clear that it was no longer relevant.
Embarrassingly, they continued to recycle and copy the content of the plan,
including the categorical statement that Hamas had a “very low” capacity to
pass the fence.

Israel had access to the Hamas “Walls of Jericho” invasion plan, which
turned out to be almost entirely realistic on October 7th. But no one
thought that maybe orders should be prepared in advance for this scenario.
The result: six hours into the attack, as the south was awash with over
2,000 terrorists, the only available order is the one based on the
assumption that the capacity of Hamas to even cross the fence was “very
low.”

*13:00*

The Air Force focused since the morning on the primary task: to stop the
incursions across the fence. At noon they also expanded the aerial attacks
on the settlements and camps that had been occupied, at the request of
elite units such as Flotilla 13 and the Nahal commando. Since no continuous
contact had been made with the Air Force command, the pilots conducted
themselves via direct telephone conversation with officers and fighters on
the ground, and were directed to attack the gym and fitness room of the
Gaza Division at the Re’im camp, after seven of the Nukhba terrorists had
entrenched themselves there. Later, they also attacked the dining hall in
the besieged Sufa outpost.

At the time there were ten helicopter gunships in the air (out of 28 that
participated in the battles that morning, by rotation), but even at that
stage, the communication with the aerial forces was mostly improvisational,
as mentioned. Thus, for example, the second in command of Division 80,
Colonel A, who had wished to storm the citrus groves near Kerem Shalom,
personally called the commander of the helicopter gunship squadron,
Lieutenant Colonel A, and requested massive fire towards the citrus grove.
Generally, the safety range in such incidents between the ground forces and
the aerial bombardment is approximately 300 meters. This time the range was
just a few dozen meters. A few days later, an intelligence officer would
tell squadron commander A that the Nukhba terrorists were instructed not to
run that morning, knowing that the pilots would think that these were
Israelis walking, not escaping, and then would hesitate to shoot at them.
That’s what it is like when the enemy knows much more about you than you
know about them.

Response by the IDF Spokesperson: “The IDF is currently fighting the
murderous Hamas terror organization in the Gaza Strip. The IDF will hold a
thorough, detailed, and in-depth investigation into the matter to fully
clarify the details when the operational situation permits this, and will
publish its findings to the public.”
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20240120/8d3adef1/attachment-0001.htm>