'DO YOU WANT TO KILL US ALL?!': HAMAS HOSTAGES BEG FOR LIVES IN NEW VIDEO
BUT ISRAEL'S ONCE-SECRET 'HANNIBAL DIRECTIVE' REQUIRES ARMY KILL HOSTAGES HELD BY THE ENEMY
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As Israeli's begins its invasion of the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian militia Hamas released a dramatic video showing three Israeli hostages begging for their lives.
"Do you want to kill us all? Do you want to kill us all with the army?," Hamas hostage Danielle Aloni pleads in the video with fellow hostages Yelena Tropanov and Rimon Kirscht.
"This is cruel psychological propaganda," Prime Minister Netanyahu responded after Hamas published the video on Monday.
But the hostages' death is possibly decreed by a once-secret Israeli military policy called the “Hannibal Directive”—likely named for the Carthaginian general who poisoned himself to prevent capture, despite Israeli officials’ highly-suspect claim a computer randomly spit it out.
Aloni, Tropanov and Kirscht are among at least 243 Israelis and foreign nationals from 20 countries seized by Hamas during the deadly raid it launched from the Gaza Strip on October 7. Though the two sides are fighting a long, 75-year-old war over the same territory both claim as their homelands, the Palestinian raid caught Israel by total surprise.
About 2,500 Palestinian militiamen shot their way across Israel's mined, fortified border with the Gaza Strip and killed more than 1,405 Israelis, including 307 soldiers and 57 police officers. Then they either retreated back across the border or were killed in action against very slowly responding Israeli forces. Israel recovered the corpses of about 1,500 enemy fighters.
The right-wing Netanyahu Government responded to the attack by vowing vengeance. It unleashed a bombing campaign that has killed at least 8,306 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as of Monday, the Associated Press reports based on numbers from officials in Gaza. Most are women, children and the elderly. The number does not include victims that remain buried in rubble under collapsed buildings destroyed by Israeli bombs.
In the occupied West Bank, more than 110 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military or Israeli settler militia.
“Almost 50” of the hostages have also been killed by Israel’s bombing campaign, Hamas says.
Meanwhile, protests against Israel broke out all around the world over the weekend. Protests like one in New York City that drew 10,000 people and shut down the Brooklyn Bridge.
Photo Credit: JB Nicholas.
In response, Israel turned up its own propaganda campaign.
President Isaak Herzog accused Palestinian militia of beheading 23-year-old Shani Louk during their October 7 attack. Louk held dual German-Israeli citizenship. Herzog made the accusation to the German newspaper Bild.
"Only now we got the note that Shani Louk has been confirmed as murdered and dead," Herzog alleged on Monday. "They found her skull which means these barbaric sadistic animals simply chopped off her head.“
Israel has been effectively using atrocity propaganda like this since the start of the war, The Free Lance previously reported.
The hostage video was published on social media channels controlled by Hamas’s military wing, the Izz ad-Din Al-Qassam Brigades. They described it as "a number of Zionist prisoners held by Al-Qassam send a message to Netanyahu and the Zionist government."
“We are ready to conduct an immediate prisoner exchange deal that includes the release of all Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails in exchange for all prisoners held by the Palestinian resistance,” Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in the Gaza Strip, said in a statement reported by Al-Jazeera news.
Aloni was kidnapped from a kibbutz—a collective community typically based on farming—with her 5-year-old daughter, Emilia. Trupanov, her son Sasha and her mother, Irena, were kidnapped from the same kibbutz. Her husband, Vitali, was killed. Kirsht, and her partner Yagev Buchshtab, were seized at another kibbutz.
In the video, the three sit on chairs facing the camera with Aloni in the middle. She addresses Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu directly at the start of the video. She accuses him of sacrificing Israel's security and opening the door to Hamas' attack to secure his personal political ambition.
"Bibi Netanyahu," she says. "No military was there. Nobody came. Nobody heard us."
"We are innocent citizens. Citizens who pay taxes to the State of Israel," she added.
At the end of the one-minute-and-16-second-long video, Aloni pleads for Netanyahu to agree to Hamas's demand for a prisoner exchange.
"Let us go. Let us go now," she screams. "Let us return to our families now!"
Aloni likely did not speak of her free will. Yet the facts she recites are true.
The Israeli military was slow to respond. Its police were outgunned. Israel has been consumed with viciously-divisive internal politics for more than a year. Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party wants to strip the Israeli Supreme Court of its power to legally block Government policies. Israel was focused on that—not its forever war with the Palestinians.
While Israel was distracted, Hamas plotted—likely by word of mouth alone, to evade Israel’s Orwellian digital surveillance dragnet.
The Hamas video was published on X, the Internet public square formerly known as Twitter. It is being widely censored. It is being censored on the Meta-controlled Instagram. It is published here, in full. An unverified translation can be found here. The quotations in this report are verified by the Israeli newspaper, the Jerusalem Post.
The existence of the Hannibal Directive was confirmed by the New Yorker magazine’s Ruth Margalit in 2014. It requires the Israeli military to use whatever force is necessary to kill captured Israelis. At first it only applied to soldiers, but Israel has applied it to its own civilians too.
“For more than a decade, military censors blocked journalists from reporting on the protocol, apparently because they feared it would demoralize the Israeli public,” the New Yorker reported.
A 2003 Haaretz investigation also confirmed the Hannibal Directive’s existence, coldly concluding “from the point of view of the army, a dead soldier is better than a captive soldier who himself suffers and forces the state to release thousands of captives in order to obtain his release.”
The families of the three hostages held a press conference in Israel Monday evening. Perhaps with the Hannibal Directive in mind, they pleaded for the "Emir of Qatar," not Israel's leaders, "to make efforts towards the release of the hostages."
Hamas has released four hostages so far: two with dual American-Israeli citizenship and two elderly Israeli women.
Yocheved Lifshitz was one of them. She said Hamas treated her and her fellow hostages humanely. Her captors fed them they same thing they ate. When Hamas handed the 85-year-old peace activist over to the Red Cross, video captured her grasping a militiaman’s hands with hers while bidding him goodbye and peace in Hebrew.
“Shalom,” she said.
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