Western media is more Israeli than Israeli media
“I look for the day when there will be an investigation on the role of Western corporate media in this genocide."
Back in June last year, journalist Sam Husseini asked Biden’s State Department Spokesman Matthew Miller about the Hannibal Directive and reports of its use on October 7 but he received a surreal response. “I am not familiar in any way with either that supposed directive or those reports,” replied Miller, who spent his entire tenure October 7 onwards making excuses for, defending, and facilitating Israeli war crimes in Gaza from his lectern.
Hannibal Directive is an Israeli army directive through which its army personnel are allowed to kill Israelis to prevent their capture. It has been in place since 1986.
Someone like Miller would have known the minutiae of the Hannibal Directive and perhaps also the exact number of Israelis killed by the procedure on October 7, but he chose to play the fool. Playing the fool is exactly what Western media has done on the topic of Hannibal Directive for the past 16 months. Israeli media, on the other hand, has been fairly upfront about it.
On January 12, 2024, just over three months after the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, 7 Days, the weekend supplement of the Israeli outlet Yedioth Ahronoth, had published a detailed investigative account of the events of October 7.
Written by two Mossad stenographers, Ronen Bergman and Yoav Zitun, the Yedioth Ahronoth story recounts a nearly minute by minute update of the proceedings from the landmark day that destroyed Israel’s aura of invincibility once and for all. The article states that the Israeli military “instructed all its fighting units to perform the Hannibal Directive in practice, although it did so without stating that name explicitly”:
The 7 Days investigation reveals that at midday on October 7, the IDF actually instructed all of its combat units to perform the Hannibal Directive, although it did so without stating that name explicitly. The instruction was to stop “at all costs” any attempt by Hamas terrorists to return to Gaza, using language very similar to the original Hannibal Directive, despite repeated assurances from the security establishment that the Directive had been cancelled.
Six months later, on July 7, Haaretz published its own account of the Hannibal Directive. The title of the Haaretz article didn’t beat around the bush and got to the meat of the article in the headline itself, “IDF Ordered Hannibal Directive on October 7 to Prevent Hamas Taking Soldiers Captive.”
The article states that as the Palestinian freedom fighters overwhelmed the Israeli defences and completely overpowered the Gaza division, the Israeli military issued an unambiguous order: “Not a single vehicle can return to Gaza”.
The article further states:
A very senior IDF source confirmed to Haaretz that the Hannibal procedure was employed on October 7, adding that this was not used by the divisional commander. Who did give the order? This, said the source, will perhaps be established by post-war investigations.
According to the article, in response to a reported prisoner-taking by the Palestinian resistance at the Erez crossing, a command was sent, “Hannibal at Erez, dispatch a Zik.” “The Zik is an unmanned assault drone, and the meaning of this command was clear,” reports Haaretz.
That the ghastly directive was deployed at multiple locations and throughout the morning was confirmed by Haaretz:
Information obtained by Haaretz and confirmed by the army shows that throughout that morning, the Hannibal procedure was employed at two other locations penetrated by terrorists: the Re’im army base, where the divisional headquarters were located, and the Nahal Oz outpost in which female spotters were based.
It even mentions the most famous case of the Israelis killing their own: the carnage at Pessi Cohen’s house which witnessed the killing of over a dozen Israelis by their compatriots:
One case in which it is known that civilians were hit, a case that received wide coverage, took place in the house of Pessi Cohen at Kibbutz Be’eri. 14 hostages were held in the house as the IDF attacked it, with 13 of them killed.
These news stories of the Israeli military’s use of the Hannibal Directive received the Israeli government imprimatur by none other than Yoav Gallant, who was the Israeli defence minister at the time of Al-Aqsa Flood and oversaw the vast majority of the genocidal assault on Gaza before being fired from his role in November 2024.
In an interview to Channel 12 on February 6, Gallant said that the Hannibal Directive was issued “tactically” and “in various places.” “In other places it was not given, and that is a problem,” he added.
This is the first admission by an Israeli minister of the use of the notorious directive through which the self-proclaimed Jewish state makes it kosher to kill Jews lest they be taken captive.
Despite the extensive coverage of the directive in mainstream Israeli media and its official confirmation by then Israeli defence minister, none of the Western outlets have covered this seminal story.
A search of the databases of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, NBC News, CNN, Reuters, and AP returned no results for the keyword “Hannibal Directive.” Across the pond, a search of the BBC, which has effectively worked as the PR department of the Israeli military through the course of the Gaza holocaust, also returned zero results. The Guardian and the Independent in the UK and the Washington Post in the US did report on the Haaretz article, but only to downplay it, with such platitudes as the Israeli military “may have risked civilian lives” by using the directive.
Strikingly, none of these outlets have bothered to cover Gallant’s confirmation of the use of the Hannibal Directive on October 7. These are the same outlets which published every propaganda nonsense that came out of Gallant’s mouth in defence of his genocidal military’s actions in Gaza when he was at the helm.
The use of the Hannibal Directive on October 7 is one of the most significant stories from that historic day. The scenes of extensive devastation seen on that day were not possible by the light weaponry possessed by the Palestinian fighters who stormed the Israeli military’s Gaza division. The rows and rows of scorched cars — with unrecognisable, charred bodies inside them — were quite clearly the results of the occupation army’s attack helicopters which fired Hellfire missiles indiscriminately on everything that moved. Shelling by military tanks devastated homes in the kibbutzim raided by the Palestinian resistance chasing fleeing occupation soldiers and possibly killed hundreds of Israelis.
Most of the bodies were so badly burnt as a result of Israeli firepower that it was hard to identify them, so hard that Israel mistook dead Palestinian fighters for Israelis and added them in its initial death toll of 1,405 before revising it down to 1,139.
Yet, Western media hasn’t found it a story worth reporting.
The complete erasure of one of the most significant aspects of October 7 by Western media meant that the Israeli regime could lay the blame for its own criminality on the Palestinian resistance fighters who strictly attacked the Israeli military bases and military personnel. The verbatim parroting of fantastical Israeli atrocity tales, such as 40 beheaded babies, babies hung on clotheslines, babies baked in ovens, and mass rapes, while hiding Israel’s killing of fellow Israelis prepared the grounds for launching the genocidal assault on Gaza. And once the genocide was in full swing, Western media took it upon itself to justify every Israeli barbarism. The kind of revealing articles that could be found every once in a while in the Israeli press were totally absent from the Western mainstream discourse.
Western media has been fully complicit in the killing of over 300,000 Palestinians and the reduction of Gaza into an uninhabitable hellscape.
“I look for the day when there will be an investigation on the role of Western corporate media in this genocide because this is not a genocide that has been just overlooked, this is a genocide that has been justified and enabled [by Western media] absolutely,” Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, said recently.
“Because they have maintained a line, sticking to the Israeli military narrative, using their terminology, amplifying sometimes the publication like ‘there is a Hamas headquarters under Al-Shifa Hospital’, justifying the destruction of the entire hospital. They have repeated incessantly the mantra of the human shields, of the terrorists, is the subliminal effect of normalising a situation which is pathetically unlawful by inserting into the language words that create a sort of mental dogma that the Palestinians, for some reason, have brought this havoc upon themselves,” she continued.
It’s a travesty that mainstream Western media still gets eyeballs; for as long as that remains the case, a large swathe of supposedly enlightened Western public will continue to be duped and fail to tell right from wrong, black from white, and heroic freedom fighters from inhuman savages.
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A journalist who can't stop speaking truth to power
I remember the anticipation with which I used to approach the morning newspaper. I would be eager to discover what transpired the day prior. I loved reading the news. I would read my morning paper from cover to cover, not every story, of course, but stories that aroused my curiosity, and since I had varied interests, it meant reading most of the stories…
Facts. That's crazy when you consider how many lies and propaganda Israel spread. Truly disturbing.
The purpose of Toufan al Aqsa was to free the tens of thousands of people imprisoned in colonial dungeons for refusing to accept concentration camp oppression, and here we are, a million dead later by Nader’s count, engaged in the exchange that the western media strove to supplant with sheer settler slaughter, spontaneously? Bully for Francesca Albanese.