The Electronic Intifada 23 May 2025
Two Israeli soliders at the “car cemetary” in Tekuma. Under its deadly “Hannibal Directive,” Israel bombed more than 1,000 vehicles during the 7 October 2023 Palestinian assault, killing many Israeli captives.
UPIOf the many dark motifs that have characterized Israel’s attempt to conquer Palestine, one has put itself center stage in recent times. The murder of Israelis by Israelis themselves (as well as the murder of pro-Israeli Jews).
This is often done in the name of upholding the Zionist project – Israel’s state ideology.
In Miami Beach in February, Mordechai Brafman, a 27-year-old American, fired 17 shots at two Israeli tourists after mistaking them for Palestinians.
According to the arrest affidavit, he bragged to the police about what he had done, telling them he had seen two Palestinians and shot and killed them both.
The victims, who survived with minor injuries, were not in fact Palestinians. Their names were Ari and Yarin Rabey, a Jewish-Israeli father and son visiting the area.
During their time in the hospital, the son, unaware that the attacker was a Jewish American, posted on social media that the shooting had an “anti-Semitic” motive. He ended the post with the phrase “Death to the Arabs.”
How does one explain this?
A racist attacks two people because he mistakenly believed them to be from the inferior race.
Next, one of the victims believed the attacker was a member of the inferior race, then called for death to that race. While Brafman’s attorneys have claimed that he was experiencing a severe mental health crisis at the time, it is telling that this alleged crisis manifested itself in the form of a racist attempted murder.
When the indiscriminate killing of Palestinians is the norm, it should be of little surprise to find that this murderous mindset is applied more widely.
Self-harm
In 2015, a Jewish Israeli man stabbed a second Jewish Israeli man in Haifa, after mistaking him for an Arab. The victim told reporters he heard the attacker shout: “You deserve it. You are bastard Arabs.”
In court, the attacker claimed that an “inner voice” had told him to kill Arabs because he would “advance the redemption” of Israel in God’s eyes.
Later that same year, after a Palestinian attacked soldiers at a bus terminal, an Israeli mob brutally murdered an Eritrean asylum seeker they had misidentified as the attacker.
That same week, Israeli soldiers shot and killed another Jewish man they mistakenly believed to be a Palestinian.
In 2017, a Jewish settler allegedly holding a knife was shot dead by Israeli soldiers who wrote up the incident as a killing of a Palestinian.
There have been numerous deadly incidents where Israelis experiencing mental health crises have deliberately turned the Israeli army’s apparatus of violence against themselves in instances known as “suicide by soldier.” In these cases, distressed Israelis rely on the army’s reputation for killing to end their own lives.
The Hannibal Directive
Perhaps the most blatant example to date of the Israeli killing machine being unleashed against Jews occurred on 7 October 2023.
Hamas’ prison break operation shocked most of the Israeli population – though for some Israeli officials, it was clear that the attack was anticipated and expected.
As Palestinian fighters streamed into Israel, they took hundreds of military and civilian captives and began returning to Gaza. It is now well documented that the Israeli military gave the order to prevent anyone from returning to the Gaza Strip at all costs. Israel’s then defense minister Yoav Gallant himself acknowledged earlier this year that the Hannibal Directive was used by Israel that day, “tactically” and “in various places” next to Gaza.
The Hannibal Directive is a military protocol which allows Israeli forces to target and kill their own people in the event of their capture by resistance fighters. Until 7 October 2023, Israel had only been known to use the directive on its soldiers. But that day represented what one Israeli Air Force colonel acknowledged was “a mass Hannibal,” and it was largely carried out against Israeli civilians.
In practice, this meant that the Israeli forces responding to the Gaza breach were given the orders to fire indiscriminately on both Palestinians and the Israeli captives they were transporting. In his meticulous account of the day based on contemporary Israeli media reports, the journalist William Van Wagenen documented numerous instances where it is clear that Israeli civilians were killed by the Israeli military itself.
We don’t know how many Israelis were killed this way – Israel has refused to allow any genuine independent or international investigation. But it is clear that many, if not most of the civilians killed that day were killed by the overwhelming firepower the Israeli military deployed.
Bombing Israelis in Gaza
These deaths occurred both indirectly, due to the general confusion and chaos, and directly, due to the use of the Hannibal Directive. Despite this, all Israeli deaths that day have been falsely blamed by Western media on Hamas – providing a powerful propaganda justification for Israel’s subsequent genocide in Gaza.
Even after Israeli captives were taken into Gaza, the danger from the Israeli military did not subside. Israelis released in the first temporary ceasefire in November 2023 reported fearing Israeli bombs more than their captors. Israelis freed as part of the two-month ceasefire that began in January 2025 also told Israeli media that “the constant threat of nearby IDF attacks caused significant fear.”
There was a good reason for this. Dozens of Israeli captives have been killed during the Israeli assault on Gaza. Israeli sources state that this number has reached 41, but Hamas’ military wing said last year that Israel has killed at least 70 of its own captives while bombing Gaza.
Some Israelis even accept such deaths in the wider Zionist cause. Irish-Israeli settler Thomas Hand told Israeli TV last year that he would have said “yeah okay” to the bombing to death of his own captive daughter Emily if it meant destroying Hamas. The 9-year-old was released in November 2023’s temporary truce.
In a notorious incident during Israel’s invasion, Israeli soldiers in Gaza shot three escaped Israeli captives who were waving a white flag with Hebrew writing on it.
According to witnesses, three unarmed figures signaled the Israeli troops on the battlefield. The troops opened fire, killing two of them as the third retreated into a building. Despite the third captive audibly yelling in Hebrew, the army shot him dead as soon as he exited.
In Gaza, the Israeli army also shot and killed one of their own contractors after mistaking him for a Palestinian.
Israel gassed Jews to death
In addition to the devastating power of the 2,000-pound American bombs that Israel dropped in Gaza, the munitions also leave a toxic gaseous byproduct. Israeli publication +972 Magazine recently reported that Israelis had done extensive research in weaponizing this gas.
“The Air Force conducted physio-chemical research on the effect of the gas in enclosed spaces, and the military has deliberated over the method’s ethical implications,” they reported.
Sources told the magazine that there were “dozens” of Israeli airstrikes that likely endangered or killed captives.
“While attacks were aborted when there was specific, definitive intelligence indicating the presence of a hostage,” the Israeli publication reported, “the army routinely authorized strikes when the intelligence picture was murky and there was a ‘general’ likelihood that hostages were present in the vicinity of a target.”
“Mistakes definitely happened, and we bombed hostages,” one intelligence source told +972 Magazine.
In one particular strike in February 2024, this practice killed six Israeli captives. Almost a year later, the Israeli military claimed that all had been executed by Hamas.
However, in an interview with +972 Magazine, the wife of a dead captive recalled being initially told in private by the army that her husband had “died from carbon monoxide gas as a result of the deep strikes.” And even after the army changed its assessment of the cause of death, they admitted that had they not been executed: “the hostages would have died from inhaling the gas released by the strike.”
In another strike on a residential building that killed dozens of Palestinians, the Israeli military also killed three captives with the toxic gas. Here, the military claimed that they were completely unaware that the captives were present, though a source speaking to +972 contradicted this.
“It was surreal,” the source explained, “because you see in the identification of the person you are bombing that he is a ‘suspected kidnapper’ of Israelis, meaning that there is a chance there are hostages next to him. In retrospect, we know that many Israelis were held underground. But for sure, mistakes happened and we bombed hostages.”
Israel at the expense of Jews
Zionist-on-Zionist violence is only a microcosm of the destructive nature of this colonial ideology.
At its core, it is a worldview that elevates a jingoistic, nationalist hatred in order to fuel the expansion of the Israeli project. Even though this project claims to represent and protect Jewish people, those same people can easily be sacrificed.
This was true when Zionists opposed the international boycott of Nazi Germany in favor of an agreement with Hitler to facilitate transferring Jews to Palestine.
It was true when Israel invaded its neighbors without provocation in 1967 and seized more land. It was true when Israel refused to end its occupation in exchange for peace in the immediate aftermath of 1967.
It was true every time Israel worked hard to torpedo unity agreements between Palestinian factions, even when these factions explicitly condemned violence. In each of these cases, the expansionist political project was prioritized, even when it was clear that more violence would ensue.
The maximalist dream of a Jewish-only “Greater Israel” takes precedence over all concerns, including that of the lives of individual Jews or anyone else for that matter.
Over the decades, high-ranking Israeli military and intelligence officers have repeatedly pointed out that the root causes of any insecurity Israelis feel is that they are oppressing an entire society, and that the oppressed people aren’t going to take it lying down.
The fact that ending this oppression is so far outside the political mainstream within Israeli society demonstrates that the internal logic of Zionism leads to a self-destructive death spiral – a dynamic which also endangers the very same Jewish people it claims to represent.
Through this lens, every victim of a Palestinian rocket, bombing or knife attack, as well as those killed on 7 October 2023 are, to a significant degree, victims of Israel and its ideology, Zionism.
As long as this ideology persists – from Miami Beach to Tel Aviv – we can expect more Mordechai Brafmans in the future.
Bryce Greene is a writer and contributor to Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. He is also pursuing a PhD at Indiana University - Bloomington.
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