Hannibal Directive
The Hannibal Directive, also translated as Hannibal Procedure or Hannibal Protocol, is the name of a controversial procedure used by the Israel Defense Forces to prevent the capture of Israeli soldiers by enemy forces. Author Eyal Weizman has described a 2014 Israeli policy stating that "the kidnapping must be stopped by all means, even at the price of striking and harming our own forces." It was introduced in 1986, after a number of abductions of IDF soldiers in Lebanon and subsequent controversial prisoner exchanges. The full text of the directive was never published, and until 2003, Israeli military censorship forbade any discussion of the subject in the press. The directive has been changed several times, and in 2016 Gadi Eisenkot ordered the formal revocation of the standing directive and the reformulation of the protocol.
Two versions of the Hannibal Directive may have existed simultaneously at times: a written version, accessible only to the upper echelon of the IDF, and an "oral law" version for division commanders and lower levels. In the latter version, "by all means" was often interpreted literally, as in "an IDF soldier was 'better dead than abducted'". In 2011, IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz stated the directive does not permit killing IDF soldiers to prevent abduction.
In the case of the abduction of [|Gilad Shalit], invocation of the Hannibal Directive occurred too late to have any influence on the course of events.
Israeli newspapers including Haaretz, ABC News and the UN's Commission of Inquiry have reported that during the October 7 attacks the IDF ordered the Hannibal Directive to be used. The IDF was ordered to prevent "at all costs" the abduction of Israeli civilians or soldiers, possibly leading to the death of a large number of Israeli hostages.
Background
Israel has, with several notable exceptions, adhered to the principle of not negotiating with those it considers terrorists, especially in hostage situations. This policy led to some notable successes, such as Operation Entebbe, but also to loss of human life, e.g. the Maalot Massacre. In cases where Israeli soldiers were captured and no military solution was found, Israel was forced to negotiate with the captors for an exchange of prisoners. Parts of the Israeli public would not accept abandoning captured soldiers to their fate.In 1970, a member of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement entered Israel from Lebanon and abducted a security guard in the northernmost Israeli town of Metula. He did this to secure a swap of the guard for a member of Fatah, jailed in Israel.
In 1979, Israel agreed to exchange an Israeli POW held by Palestinians for 76 convicted Palestinian militants in Israeli jails.
During the 1982 Lebanon War, Palestinian forces imprisoned nine IDF soldiers as POWs. Six were held by Fatah and three by the pro-Syrian PFLP-GC. In 1983, Israel agreed to free 4,700 Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners, including several high ranking PLO officers, for the six IDF soldiers held captive by Fatah. The following year Israel agreed to free another 1,150 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. Many were allowed to remain in Israeli controlled territory.
The Hannibal Directive
According to Haaretz reporter Leibovich-Dar, the motivation for the directive was the capture of two Israeli soldiers during a Hezbollah ambush in South Lebanon in June 1986. Both soldiers presumably died during the attack, and their bodies were returned to Israel in an exchange with Hezbollah in 1996. The directive developers were three top officers of the IDF Northern Command: Major General Yossi Peled, the command's operations officer; Colonel Gabi Ashkenazi; and the intelligence officer, Colonel Yaakov Amidror. The order was secret, and its existence was denied by Israeli military authorities.The exact wording of the directive was not known, though Leibovich-Dar claimed that it had been updated several times over the years. Anshel Pfeffer, writing in The Jerusalem Post, described the order in 2006 as the "rumored" standard procedure in the eventuality of a kidnap attempt: "soldiers are told, though never officially" the content of this order.
Maariv quoted a version of the directive apparently applicable in 2014:
This section was accompanied by an asterisk comment emphasizing: "In any case, everything should be done to stop the vehicle and not allow it to escape".
Apparently, the Hannibal Directive existed in several versions at that time. It had been amended by the IDF General Staff in October 2013, but neither the corresponding orders at the IDF Southern Command, nor the one at the Gaza Division had been similarly updated by July 2014. The three different, simultaneously current, versions of the directive could therefore be interpreted in different ways, especially on the sensitive question of the value of a soldier's life.
The origin of the name is uncertain. Israeli officials insisted that the directive's name was a random computer-generated designation; however, Hannibal, the Carthaginian general, is said to have preferred suicide by poison rather than being taken prisoner by his Roman enemies.
According to statements by several Israeli officials, the aim of the directive is to prevent the capture of an IDF soldier by enemy forces, even by risking the soldier's life or the lives of scores of non-Israeli civilians. Israeli spokespersons claim that IDF forces are forbidden to attempt to kill a captured soldier, rather than having him captured. Many testimonies from IDF soldiers and other sources contradict this claim and suggest that the IDF in practice adheres to the principle that a dead soldier is better than a captive soldier.
According to the directive, once it had been declared by a field officer, Israeli forces were to open fire on enemy forces carrying away an IDF prisoner. Vehicles suspected of removing such a prisoner from the battlefield could thus be attacked, even at the risk of harming, or even killing, the abductee himself. According to some interpretations, this includes even firing missiles from attack helicopters or firing tank shells at suspected escaping vehicles.
Amos Harel of Haaretz wrote in November 2011 that the Hannibal Directive was suspended for a time "due to opposition from the public and reservist soldiers" but was revised and reinstated by IDF Chief-of-Staff Benny Gantz after the abduction of Gilad Shalit in June 2006. The revised order stated that IDF commanders may take whatever action is necessary, even at the risk of endangering the life of an abducted soldier, to foil an abduction, but it does not allow them to kill an abducted Israeli soldier. The post-2006 version gave local field commanders the right to invoke Hannibal and take action, without waiting for superior officers' confirmation.
Former head of Israeli military intelligence Shlomo Gazit criticised the fact that a low level officer could invoke the Hannibal Directive, with such potentially far reaching consequences. The invocation of the Hannibal Directive in the 2006 Hezbollah cross-border raid had far-reaching consequences. An IDF tank sent in pursuit of the abductors was attacked, killing its crew. Attempts to rescue the bodies of the tank crew led to further IDF losses. By the time the Israeli government convened to decide how to respond to the attack, Israel – according to Gazit – "was already at war".
The Hannibal Directive was officially revoked by the military in 2016.
According to the Times of Israel, the directive was replaced by three separate directives in January 2017. They were named "True Test", "Tourniquet" and "Guardian of life" and dealt with abductions in the West Bank and outside Israel in peace time and a general directive for war time. Very little is known about the content of these directives or the eventual differences between them. One general difference between the new and the previous Hannibal directive is that now it is clearly stated that, in case of an attempted abduction, soldiers should fire at the abductors "while avoiding hitting the captive".
A July 2024 Haaretz investigation revealed that the IDF ordered the Hannibal Directive to be used during the October 7 attacks.
In September 2024 ABC News in Australia reported on the use of the Hannibal Directive on October 7.
Controversy within the IDF
Dr. Avner Shiftan, an army physician with the rank of major, came across the Hannibal directive while on reserve duty in South Lebanon in 1999. In army briefings he "became aware of a procedure ordering soldiers to kill any IDF soldier if he should be taken captive by Hezbollah. This procedure struck me as being illegal and not consistent with the moral code of the IDF. I understood that it was not a local procedure but originated in the General Staff, and had the feeling that a direct approach to the army authorities would be of no avail, but would end in a cover-up."He contacted Asa Kasher, the Israeli philosopher noted for his authorship of Israel Defense Forces' Code of Conduct, who "found it difficult to believe that such an order exists" since this "is wrong ethically, legally and morally". He doubted that "there is anyone in the army" believing that 'better a dead soldier than an abducted soldier'. Haaretz article about Dr. Shiftan's experience was the first to be published in an Israeli newspaper.
In contrast to the view of Kasher, the IDF Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz said in an interview with Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth in 1999: "In certain senses, with all the pain that saying this entails, an abducted soldier, in contrast to a soldier who has been killed, is a national problem." Asked whether he was referring to cases like Ron Arad and Nachshon Wachsman, he replied "definitely, and not only".
According to Prof. Emanuel Gross, from the Faculty of Law at the University of Haifa, "Orders like that have to go through the filter of the Military Advocate General's Office, and if they were not involved that is very grave", he said. "The reason is that an order that knowingly permits the death of soldiers to be brought about, even if the intentions were different, carries a black flag and is a flagrantly illegal order that undermines the most central values of our social norms".
Harel writes that a kind of "Oral Law" has developed inside IDF, which is supported by many commanders, even at brigade and division level. It goes further than the official order, including the use of tank shells or air strikes. "A dangerous, unofficial interpretation of the protocol has been created", a senior officer told Haaretz. "Intentionally targeting a vehicle in order to kill the abductee is a completely illegal command. The army's senior command must make this clear to officers."
In anticipation of the Gaza War in 2009, Lt. Col. Shuki Ribak, the commander of the Golani Brigade's 51st battalion, instructed his soldiers to avoid kidnapping at any cost and even made clear that he expected his soldiers to commit suicide rather than being abducted:
After a recording of Ribak's instructions was distributed by an anonymous source, the IDF reiterated its denial of having a policy of intentionally killing captured soldiers.