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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/israeli-hq-ordered-troops-shoot-israeli-captives-7-october">electronicintifada.net</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Israeli HQ ordered troops to shoot Israeli captives on 7 October</h1>
<p class="gmail-node__submitted">
<span class="gmail-field gmail-field-author"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/asa-winstanley">Asa Winstanley</a></span>
<span class="gmail-field gmail-field-blog"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/blog/rights-and-accountability">Rights and Accountability</a></span>
<span class="gmail-field gmail-field-publication-date"><span class="gmail-date-display-single">20 January 2024</span></span> </p>
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<img src="https://electronicintifada.net/sites/default/files/styles/original_800w/public/2024-01/hannibal-car-lot-netivot.jpg?itok=hjJQ0Swm×tamp=1705753886" width="391" height="255" alt="Dozens of destroyed cars and vans sitting in an open lot" title="" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;">
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<p>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.</p><small>
<span>UPI</span></small>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The military “instructed all its fighting units to perform the <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/hannibal-directive">Hannibal Directive</a> in practice, although it did so without stating that name explicitly,” Israeli journalists revealed last weekend.</p>
<p>The revelations came in <a href="https://w.ynet.co.il/yediot/7-days/time-of-darkness">a new investigative article</a>
by Ronen Bergman and Yoav Zitun, two journalists with extensive sources
inside Israel’s military and intelligence establishment.</p>
<p>They also revealed that “some 70 vehicles” driven by Palestinian
fighters returning to Gaza were blown up by Israeli helicopter gunships,
drones or tanks.</p>
<p>Many of these vehicles contained Israeli captives.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“At least in some of the cases, everyone in the vehicle was killed,” the journalists explain.</p>
<p>The Hebrew piece has not been translated into English by its publisher, <em>Yedioth Ahronoth</em>, a newspaper which translates many of its articles. You can <a>read The Electronic Intifada’s full English version</a>, translated by Dena Shunra, below.</p>
<p>The secretive “Hannibal” doctrine is named after an ancient Carthaginian general <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hannibal-Carthaginian-general-247-183-BCE/Exile-and-death">who poisoned himself rather</a> than be captured alive by the Roman Empire.</p>
<p>The order aims at stopping Israelis from being taken captive by
resistance fighters who could later use them as leverage in prisoner
swap deals.</p>
<h2>“Overpowered”</h2>
<p>The latest revelations confirm The Electronic Intifada’s <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/evidence-israel-killed-its-own-citizens-7-october/41156">reporting since 7 October</a> that many – if not most – of the Israeli civilians killed that day were killed by Israel itself, not Palestinian fighters.</p>
<p>Initial claims stated that 1,400 Israelis were killed by Hamas in the
Palestinian assault that began on 7 October. But Israel has <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/we-blew-israeli-houses-7-october-says-israeli-colonel">repeatedly revised this figure downwards</a>, so that it now stands at “over 1,000.”</p>
<p>It was also clear from the outset that hundreds of the dead were in fact Israeli soldiers.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”
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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.”
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>For hours, therefore, Israel’s top brass were in the dark as to the scale of the assault.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<h2>1,000 drone targets inside Israel</h2>
<p>In November, <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/shoot-everything-how-israeli-pilots-killed-their-own-civilians">The Electronic Intifada reported</a>
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.</p>
<p>That Israeli article stated that “in the first four hours …
helicopters and fighter craft attacked about 300 targets, most in
Israeli territory.”</p>
<p>Bergman and Zitun’s new article says that by the end of the day, drone squadron 161 alone (which flies <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/elbit-systems">Elbit’s</a> Hermes 450 drone) “performed no fewer than 110 attacks on some 1,000 targets, most of which were inside Israel.”
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As reported by The Electronic Intifada in English for the first time, Israeli news media last month <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/israeli-general-killed-israelis-7-october-then-lied-about-it/43176">showed footage of tank operators firing</a> at Israeli homes inside the kibbutzes during the battles with the Palestinian resistance on 7 October.
<p>The Electronic Intifada was also <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/israeli-forces-shot-their-own-civilians-kibbutz-survivor-says/38861">the first to reveal in English</a>, back in October, the testimony of <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/yasmin-porat">Yasmin Porat</a>,
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>She later elaborated that the casualties of the Israeli attack included <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/israeli-child-burned-completely-israeli-tank-fire-kibbutz/41706">12-year-old Israeli captive Liel Hatsroni</a>.
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 <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/naftali-bennett">Naftali Bennett</a> lied.
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Last month The Electronic Intifada also <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/we-blew-israeli-houses-7-october-says-israeli-colonel">reported on an Israeli air force colonel</a> who admitted that 7 October was a “mass Hannibal” event and that their drones had blown up Israeli homes that day.
<p>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 <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/hizballah">Hizballah</a>.</p>
<p>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.”
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Two years after it was exposed by journalists during the 2014 war on Gaza, the doctrine was <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-chief-puts-an-end-to-contentious-hannibal-protocol/">allegedly revoked, or at least</a>
“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.”
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>“Fire at will”</h2>
<p>Since 7 October, there has been a <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/evidence-israel-killed-its-own-citizens-7-october/41156">steadily growing stream of evidence</a>
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.</p>
<p>This evidence has been studiously ignored by mainstream media in the West.</p>
<p>It has been reported on in English by independent media, including The Electronic Intifada, <em>The Grayzone</em>, <em>The Cradle</em> and <em>Mondoweiss</em>.</p>
<p>The first two of these publications are even the subject of a planned hit piece by <em>The Washington Post</em>, precisely for their factual reporting of 7 October events.
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Last month <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/israel-admits-immense-amount-friendly-fire-7-october">the Israeli military admitted</a> that an “immense and complex quantity” of what it called “friendly fire” incidents took place on 7 October.
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The reply came from division command: “You have authority to fire at will.”
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Acting on the orders of young officers from the so-called “Fire Canopy” <a href="https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel/diplomacy-defense/111798-160502-israel-s-canopy-of-fire">mobile command center</a>,
attack helicopter pilots were also told: “You have permission [to open
fire] until further notice – and throughout the entire area.”
<p>The article also reveals the fact that dozens of operatives from
Israel’s domestic torture and assassination secret police agency the <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/shin-bet">Shin Bet</a> took part in the battles of 7 October.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>According to the article, 10 Shin Bet operatives were killed that day.</p>
<p>If this is accurate, it’s likely that another 10 of the civilians named as Israeli casualties were armed Shin Bet officers.</p>
<p>The <a href="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">casualties database</a> maintained by Israeli newspaper <em>Haaretz</em> as of this writing still names three of these Shin Bet officers as Yossi Tahar, Smadar Mor Idan and Omer Gvera.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Bergman is a particularly high profile Israeli journalist. As well as <em>Yedioth Ahronoth</em>, he <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/by/ronen-bergman">writes</a> for the <em>New York Times Magazine</em> and is the author of several sympathetic books about Israeli spy agencies, including <em>Rise and Kill First</em>.</p>
<p><a href="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">Speaking to</a> the <em>Haaretz</em>
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.</p>
<p>“Kasher stridently agreed with the families that an investigation is needed immediately,” wrote <em>Haaretz</em>, and that this should not wait until the end of the war in Gaza.</p>
<p>Yet Kasher is anything but an ethical voice. “Killing 40 civilians” in Gaza in one go is “reasonable,” he <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/killing-40-civilians-one-go-reasonable-says-israel-army-ethicist">told The Electronic Intifada in 2014</a>.</p>
<p><em>With translation by Dena Shunra.</em></p>
<h2 id="gmail-translation">Full translated article</h2>
<p><strong>The Black Time</strong></p>
<p>By Ronen Bergman and Yoav Zitun</p>
<p><a href="https://w.ynet.co.il/yediot/7-days/time-of-darkness">Published by</a> <em>Yedioth Ahronoth’s</em> weekend supplement <em>7 Days</em>, 12 January 2024.</p>
<p><em>Translation by Dena Shunra for The Electronic Intifada, based on the print edition.</em></p>
<p>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 <em>7 Days</em> 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.”</p>
<p><code>* * *</code></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p><code>* * *</code></p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>7 Days</em> 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.</p>
<p>This is what it looked like, hour by hour, on that terrible morning:</p>
<p><strong>6:26</strong></p>
<p>Massive shooting of missiles and rockets. The Hamas attack begins.</p>
<p><strong>6:30</strong></p>
<p>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 <em>7 Days</em>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>6:37</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>6:50</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>7:00</strong></p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>7:14</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Throughout this entire mess, the operators were required to be on increased alert: <em>7 Days</em>
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.</p>
<p><strong>7:30</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>7:43</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>8:00</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>8:10</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>8:32</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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</p>
<p><strong>8:58</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>9:00</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>9:30</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel/diplomacy-defense/111798-160502-israel-s-canopy-of-fire">Israeli press reports</a>.]
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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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 <em>7 Days</em>.
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.”</p>
<p><strong>10:00</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>11:30</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>11:59</strong></p>
<p>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.”]</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The <em>7 Days</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>12:30</strong></p>
<p>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. <em>7 Days</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p><strong>13:00</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p><br>
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