By noon on 7 October 2023, news of Palestinians taking hostages grip the attention of Israel’s top military and political leadership who are gathered in the “Pit”, the Kirya bunker in Tel Aviv.

Intelligence chiefs had gone there around 3am when reports came in of unusual movements by Hamas’s Al Qassam Brigades leadership. They decided not to put the IDF on high alert. Hours later, with hundreds of Israeli troops dead, battles raging over dozens of sites and reports coming in of mass killings at the Nova Music Festival, the Israeli leaders take a momentous decision: issue the Hannibal Directive. Thousands will die in the coming hours as a result.

Noon: Return of the Hannibal Directive – kill everyone

Despite calling the Hamas fighters monsters for killing civilians, the cold reality is that the Israel Defence Force killed many more civilians that day than Hamas.

The Hannibal Directive — authorising lethal force even if it kills their own people — was first issued in the 1980s to prevent soldiers who had been captured by the Palestinian resistance being used as leverage to release some of the thousands of hostages held by Israel. Freeing Palestinians in Israeli captivity was one of the goals Hamas stated at the outset of Operation Al Aqsa Flood on 7 October.

Dozens of high-ranking Palestinian leaders like Marwan Barghouti, some held for decades, are high on their priority list, not least because they could be future leaders of a free Palestine. Avoiding this was Israeli doctrine. I’ve written a number of stories on this topic including _All I wanted was to bid my daughter a final farewell_, which focused on Palestinian parliamentarian and hostage Khalida Jarrar who emerged from brutal captivity in January 2025.

According to a major report on the Israeli news site Ynet by journalists Yoav Zeiton and Ronen Bergman, when footage of hostages being taken on 7 October reached the Kirya, “This is the moment when the IDF decides on a kind of return to the Hannibal order”. The command was sent “to open fire on terrorist vehicles that were racing to Gaza, even if there were concerns that they contained hostages”. The Jerusalem Post, _Haaretz_ and other major Israeli media confirm this in interviews with political and military leaders.

As F-16 jets and Elbit Zik drones attack Gaza, destroying ambulances, civilian gatherings and all sorts of structures, a dozen Apache attack helicopters snap into action raining down missiles and machine gun fire along Route 232 and other roads heading towards the Gaza Strip. Vehicles, motorcycles, foot traffic, anything moving either into or out of the Strip is blown away. It is unknown how many of the occupants of vehicles heading back towards Gaza were hostages but they likely numbered at least in the dozens.

Chris Cobb-Smith, a 20-year veteran of the British military and now a human rights investigator, analysed Israeli video of Apache helicopters in action. Some of the footage can be seen on Al Jazeera’s blockbuster documentary October 7. It shows a gunship strafing vehicles full of people, killing survivors as they flee.

“My concern with this footage is we cannot tell whether they’re Hamas gunmen or civilians or possibly hostages. I don’t believe the helicopter pilot or the machine gun operator would be able to tell you that,” Cobb-Smith says.

Each round of the 30mm Chain Gun is the size of your hand and they spit out 650 rounds per minute. Miraculously, one of the hostages, though seriously wounded, survives this hail of lead and is left for dead. She is rescued and lives to tell of the shock as the Apache turns its fire on the flatbed vehicle that she and eight others have been thrown onto minutes before.

It is worth mentioning that Asa Kasher, the man who wrote the IDF’s Ethics Code, described the use of the Hannibal Directive on 7 October as “ Unlawful, Unethical and Horrifying”. Our governments yawned and looked the other way.

Evening

By the time the IDF largely regains control (it will take three days in all), the world already knows Hamas has struck an unprecedented blow against the State of Israel. Hundreds of soldiers, including high-ranking officers, have been killed. Also among the dead are over a dozen Shin Bet agents, and over 100 police officers and local security. Hundreds of civilians have also been killed on the Israeli side, bringing the body count to just under 1200.

The Palestinians lose hundreds of their best fighters, and an unknown number of civilians, largely to Apache helicopters that obliterate traffic heading back to Gaza, and by the jets and drones that bomb inside the Strip itself. Many are injured on both sides. Thirty-six Israeli children are killed, mostly in the kibbutzim, by stray bullets from both Palestinian and Israeli gunfire, as well as Israeli tanks shelling houses containing both Palestinian fighters and Israelis. Dozens of foreign nationals are killed. Amongst the dead are passport holders from France, Thailand, the US, Ukraine, Russia, the UK, Nepal, Germany and Australia.

A total of 251 hostages are taken by a variety of Palestinian groups and individuals. Hamas leadership had apparently instructed its fighters to only take military hostages but in the chaos and violence of the day these orders were clearly not followed. Hamas fighters were amongst a variety of Palestinian groups and individuals who committed serious war crimes.

Palestinian lives do not** matter** 

A large number of the Palestinians killed that day, as was evident from the footage, were civilians who crossed through the freshly-blown gaps in the perimeter to “sight-see”. If you read the Western media reports from 7 October through to the present, it is clear that Palestinian lives do not matter. They are ignored; uncounted, invisible.

For many of the dead, it was the first time they had ever stepped outside of the Strip. For others, it was their first contact with their stolen homeland in years and they just wanted to have a look. Some were there to loot a horse, a tractor, a TV set or whatever they could get before rushing back to the concentration camp that is Gaza. Some were resistance fighters on a mission to take the fight to the enemy. Others were Israeli hostages. The Apaches did not discriminate, despite the rules of war requiring their pilots to do so.

Midnight: the genocide starts now!

Richard Sanders, head of Al Jazeera’s investigative unit, made a telling comment a year after the attack. “Hamas and others committed very real crimes on 7 October. The oddity was that in the days that followed, the world’s media focused not on the crimes they did commit, but on crimes they did not commit.”

The motive for official Israeli and American lies about beheaded babies, systematic rape, burning piles of children and other fictitious atrocities completely “escaped” the major media outlets that repeated them as holy scripture. My first story after 7 October, published in October 2023, was entitled 40 Beheaded Babies Survived the Hamas Attack. It debunked some of these fabrications but also looked at how “monster” propaganda has long been used to delegitimise an enemy and prepare the public for your own team to commit appalling real crimes.

No baby died on the Israeli side that day, according to official Israeli reports. Similarly, stories of systematic rape have been demolished. The first of what would be thousands of Palestinian babies really did die that day.

Dawn

Human Rights Watch and other human rights organisations have written detailed reports on the events of 7 October and it is clear that various Palestinian groups, including individual Hamas fighters, committed serious war crimes on 7 October, most particularly at the Nova festival where hundreds were killed.

In September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory reported that Israeli authorities and forces have committed and are continuing to commit genocide in the Gaza Strip. Genocide is the highest form of state terrorism.

If international justice is not just a tool deployed sporadically by the powerful white countries to attack Muslims, Africans and Slavs, then all those who have credible cases to answer for war crimes in Israel and the Palestinian Territories must face international justice. It would be hypocritical and deplorable if the major criminals — Biden, Trump, Starmer, Merz, Von der Leyen, Macron, Netanyahu and many others — were not to appear in the dock.

It is telling that Hamas has said it would welcome an international inquiry while the powerful white Western countries and Israel would see hell freeze over before they allow their leaders to face independent judicial scrutiny. In their document Our Narrative: Operation Al Aqsa Flood, Hamas has an entire section ‘ Towards a transparent international investigation’. That really is worth pondering.

Making the Palestinians pay the price of freedom

Two years on from 7 October, the Palestinian people and their leaders continue their grim struggle for justice and freedom.

We need to de-demonise Hamas and leave it to the Palestinian people to choose their leaders. I will give the last word to Azzam Tamimi, author of the excellent book Hamas: A History from Within:

“Pinpoint for me one struggle for liberation in which there was no costly price to pay. How many millions perished in Vietnam in order for Vietnam to become free? So you see, there’s no easy way. There is no small price for freedom and for independence. And the Palestinians do understand that.”

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.