Israel is intentionally killing the captives in Gaza

While Israeli officials promise to bring the captives in Gaza back alive, prominent Israeli experts say the military is implementing the Hannibal Directive to kill them.

On January 15, Hamas published a video of Israeli captive Noa Argamani announcing that Israeli airstrikes killed fellow captives Yossi Sharabi and Itay Svirsky

Argamani said she was injured and trapped under rubble for two days after Israeli missile attacks on a house, and that Sharabi was killed. Svirsky, she recounted, was bombed while being transported in an ambulance.

“Stop this madness and brings us home to our families,” Argamani implored the Netanyahu government.

The killing of Israeli captives by Israeli airstrikes appears to be not only deliberate, but an application of the Hannibal Directive, a classified Israeli military protocol that seeks to prevent its forces from being taken captive, even if it means killing them.

Numerous released Israeli captives have described the terror they experienced being under Israeli bombing in Gaza, and some sustained injuries.

On December 23, Hamas said airstrikes have killed 60 hostages. Israel claims 20 of the roughly 130 captives remaining in Gaza area dead.

Israeli sociologist and military specialist Yagil Levy suggested that Israel is indeed trying to kill them as part of the Hannibal Directive.

“The government's decision to attack Gaza despite the presence of hostages in the bombed sites can be considered an extension of the ‘Hannibal’ procedure - that is, an attempt to thwart the continuation of the captivity even at the cost of risking the lives of the hostages. The obvious explanation is that the right perceives the pressure to stop the fighting as endangering the pursuit of victory and revenge in Gaza, and therefore the lives of the abductees are another reasonable sacrifice that must be made,” Levy wrote.

He noted that the 2016 state comptroller's report described “enthusiasm among soldiers and junior commanders for the idea of deliberately harming a hostage to prevent his abduction alive.”

In an interview with the Israeli media outlet Shomrim, an unnamed figure who was involved in the Gilad Shalit exchange said that Israel was invoking the Hannibal Directive.

“We are experiencing the flip side of the Shalit case,” he explained, referring to the 2011 deal that saw Shalit exchanged for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. “Hamas expected this to be a repeat of the Shalit case. They thought that they would kidnap Israelis and that we would cave in. I believe that it will not happen quickly - if at all. The State of Israel has implemented the Hannibal Directive on the whole of the Gaza Strip (since the current conflict erupted), based on the understanding that the moment we release prisoners, we are opening the door for countless more abductions.”

As I revealed last week, Netanyahu is waging a psychological war against the families who demand an exchange, which represent an overwhelming majority of the 240 families.

As it becomes clear that Israel is attempting to kill its own captives in order to eliminate the only internal obstacle towards an open-ended war and direct occupation of the Gaza Strip, it appears that a fierce struggle led by their families is the only force that has any possibility of challenging those plans and saving their lives.