In Mondoweiss

In Israeli military terminology, the so-called “Hannibal Directive” is the policy of firing upon one’s own soldiers to avert a prospective captive situation.

There is a growing amount of evidence and testimony that suggests that on October 7, the Hannibal Directive was implemented, at least to a certain extent, on Israelis. What’s more, growing testimonies indicate that this policy was extended to Israeli civilians in the form of indiscriminate fire from helicopters and tanks.

The current Israeli war on Gaza continues a long history of attacks on and elimination of the Palestinian Christian community in Gaza, Jerusalem, and the West Bank. Since 2007, the small but long-standing Christian community in Gaza has declined from three thousand to about one thousand living in the Strip today; in the West Bank and Jerusalem, the larger Palestinian Christian community of about 50,000 has faced a similar decline over the past few decades.

In large part, this population decline has been driven by the stresses of Israeli occupation, apartheid, and siege in Palestine and facilitated by the greater welcome extended by many Western countries to Christian as opposed to Muslim Palestinian emigrants.

However, as Ramzy Baroud points out, the elimination of the Palestinian Christian community is also convenient for Israel, as it “is keen to present the ‘conflict’ in Palestine as a religious one so that it could…brand itself as a beleaguered Jewish state amid a massive Muslim population in the Middle East.”

“The continued existence of Palestinian Christians,” notes Baroud, “does not factor nicely into this Israeli agenda.”

It really is hard to imagine a more malicious statement than “the children of Gaza have brought this upon themselves” when children in Gaza are now being massacred by the hundreds. But this was actually said in a recent Knesset session. And it wasn’t someone considered an extreme right-winger, but a liberal centrist – Meirav Ben-Ari from Yair Lapid’s opposition party Yesh Atid.