Pearls and Irritations
John Menadue’s Public Policy Journal
By Keith Mitchelson
Feb 4, 2025
The New York Times gained remarkable access to more than 100 Israel Defence Force soldiers, who confirmed that altered IDF practices caused the outrageous death toll among Palestinians in Gaza. Everyone should read the original article.
The New York Times investigation “Israel Loosened Its Rules to Bomb Hamas Fighters, Killing Many More Civilians” from 26 Dec 2024 is a brilliant piece of investigation and a chilling disclosure of IDF operations during the 15 month-long destruction of Gaza. NYT reporters reviewed military records and interviewed over a hundred anonymous IDF soldiers and officers, including 25 who determining bombing targets. Quoting: ‘The order (relaxing targeting constraints), has not previously been reported, and had no precedent in Israeli military history’. ‘Mid-ranking officers were given leeway to attack many targets, many of lower military significance, often with such high civilian cost.”
‘The investigation found Israel severely weakened safeguards meant to protect civilians; and adopted flawed methods to find targets and assess civilian risk. It failed to review civilian harm caused. It ignored warnings from within the IDF, and from U.S. military officials.”
It eventually meant rank-and-file Hamas militants were targeted at home, surrounded by relatives and neighbours. IDF planners argue crude models were used to locate potential targets, such as cell-phone activity in neighbourhoods. Upper limits on civilian casualties also likely became a ‘daily objective’, rather than a rarely reached failure.
The NYT confirmed that at 1pm on 7 October 2023 the IDF ordered the relaxation of the rules protecting Palestinian civilians, yet, “only a few weeks later there were virtually no limits on the number of civilians who could be killed, alongside loosely defined ‘Hamas targets’ in Gaza”. These revelations seemingly try to explain the outrageous numbers of Gazan dead, despite IDF spokesmen claiming throughout the war that “it only targets known Hamas operatives”. The investigators noted “over 90% of the bombs dropped on Gaza in the first weeks of the war were 1000 and 2000 lb” monsters that could destroy entire buildings, indiscriminately killing many; bravely noting many bombs were American made.
Interviewing Gazan survivors as well, the NYT noted that most Palestinians killed in bombing raids are not accounted in Health Ministry death tolls, as their bodies were unrecoverable from the building rubble. Killing of 20, 30, or rarely 50 civilians to destroy a single military target were described.
IDF soldiers could drop one-ton bombs on any infrastructure, on military targets, on Islamic fighters at home, eventually on their wider associates. Targets included lookouts, money changers, and suspected underground tunnels (where Israeli hostages might also likely be hidden).
The NYT investigation contains candid and deeply disturbing information, confirming the assertions of independent humanitarian agencies working in Gaza, that precise targeting of Hamas operatives was ‘a fiction’. Aerial images of Gaza show a wasteland of utterly destroyed buildings, with every house bombed. The IDF made the entire population homeless, while forbidding rebuilding.
The medical journal Lancet published an estimate of some 186,000 unidentified-dead buried under building rubble, though newspaper Haaretz suggests a lower number. Adding this first estimate to nearly 49,000 war dead identified to Gazan Health Authorities, and another 20,000 mostly child deaths from starvation, and 5,000 deaths because hospitals are destroyed, the latter reported by American healthcare workers to President Biden on 2 October 2024, the aggregate of the victims reaches almost a quarter of a million Gazans dead.
The Hannibal Directive
The NYT particularly noted ‘The order (relaxing targeting) has not previously been reported, and had no precedent in Israeli military history”. The investigation makes no mention of the secret Hannibal Directive which has a 40 year-long precedent in Israeli military history, which allows Israeli military hostages to be killed.
The Hannibal Directive was invoked in Israeli Occupied Palestine during the Hamas incursion at precisely 12 p.m. on 7 October 2023, along the newly described targeting of Palestinians in Gaza one hour later.
Earlier, at 6:30 a.m. on 7 Oct 2023, Hamas militants had breached the fences surrounding Gaza and entered Israeli Occupied Palestine. From then the IDF was trying to prevent insurgents attacking military installations and stopping kidnapped Israelis being transported back to Gaza as hostages. IDF battles in Occupied Palestine continued from the 7 to 9 October, killing thousands of insurgents and Israelis alike.
Some of the 100 solders interviewed by the NYT must have fought in Occupied Palestine from 7 -9 Oct, yet no mention is made of Hannibal. The NYT article implies the relaxed targeting was uniquely applied against Palestinians in Gaza. Yet the ‘relaxed-targeting’ of Israeli civilians and soldiers captured by Hamas was a hallmark of the IDF war in Occupied Palestine under the Hannibal Directive order.
The Israeli government claims all IDF actions were against Hamas. Yet accounts from IDF solders and civilian survivors have indicated many Israelis killed during the Hamas incursion died at the hands of IDF soldiers wildly applying the Hannibal Directive, ordered by their commanders. These events have been published in Israeli newspapers, and by Chris Hedges RealNews Network.
The Netanyahu government claims the 1200 Israeli deaths on 7 October were exclusively due to Hamas terrorists. The government used these initial Israeli deaths to justify the murderous destruction of all Gaza, which the NYT vividly describes in their investigation.
Lack of access for Israeli journalists
Israeli media has not been afforded access to such numbers of serving IDF personnel, rather, occasional named Israeli soldiers personally revealed limited operational details. Israeli newspaper Haaretz reprinted the NYT investigation, suggesting other mainstream Israeli media should do so too.
I believe the details revealed by IDF soldiers who spoke to the NYT are true, yet I find it unlikely that 100 serving soldiers would speak of illegal methods, and show restricted military documents to reporters, without the approval of their commanders. Interviewees said IDF actions in Gaza were because of “existential fear of Hamas” (for all 470 days?). One might expect disenchanted soldiers upset with IDF brutality could reveal heinous methods, but not 100, speaking anonymously because of military secrecy. Perhaps anonymity is to avoid potential prosecution for war crimes.
When provided with a summary of the NYT’s findings: “the Israeli military acknowledged that its rules of engagement had changed after Oct. 7, regarding targeting of Gazans”. This clearly shows that IDF command allowed such damaging information to be revealed to the NYT. Otherwise why admit it, and why now after 15 months of insisting on the correct conduct of the IDF in pursuing Hamas?
My reading is that the government wants to bury knowledge of the Hannibal Directive being ordered in Occupied Palestine from midday of 7 October 2023, which involved the illegal deaths of hundreds of Israeli civilians by IDF hands. Claims of relaxation of targeting of Palestinians at almost the same time and date, larded with many gory details, smothers other illegal actions from the distant start of the war.
The government believes if the world hears in the NYT the brutal realities of Palestinians murdered in their homes from 100 authoritative, but anonymous soldiers, they will think only Palestinians were ever targeted.
The Israeli Government does not want allies to realise their IDF killed numerous Israeli civilians claimed as murdered by Hamas. Many Israeli hostages being released in prisoner-exchanges confirmed, some in face-to-face meetings with Netanyahu, that the IDF tried to kill them from their first moments of capture by Hamas, and throughout their long months of captivity. As more hostages return, these first-hand accounts will be heard again.
As Israel commences a new bombing campaign against Palestinian cities in the West Bank of Occupied Palestine, claiming them a “hotbed of Islamic terrorism”, we know from the NYT report the methods they will be using.
Keith Mitchelson
Keith Mitchelson has a 40-year experience in academic and commercial biotechnology sectors in the UK, China, and Australia.
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