As Israeli forces recaptured territories temporarily taken by Hamas earlier that day, the commander of the national rescue unit of the Israeli army’s Home Front Command Colonel Golan Vach led the recovery of corpses from the region, which spanned an area of hundreds of square kilometers. A week later, Vach began asserting that Hamas fighters had brutally executed “eight babies” in a single house in Kibbutz Be’eri.
“They were concentrated there and they killed them and they burned them,” Vach told a throng of reporters on 14 October, pointing through a smashed window into the charred living room of kibbutz resident Pessi Cohen.
According to the only two captives who survived the bloodbath, however, a total of 13 civilians died at Cohen’s home, including Cohen herself, and none were babies or toddlers.
All of them were middle-aged or older, save for adolescent twins taken captive from next door.
None of the 13 civilians killed were executed and only one of them was certainly killed by Hamas fighters who conquered the kibbutz house by house on the morning of 7 October, the survivors say. The remaining 12 were killed hours later during Israel’s counteroffensive to reconquer the territory.
After heated exchanges over the phone with the commander of a Qassam fighting force of dozens dug in at the Cohen home in Be’eri, Israeli police arrived at the home in the middle of the afternoon with guns blazing.
At least two captives were killed in the hours of crossfire that ensued, but many if not all of the remaining 10 captives, along with all the remaining Qassam fighters, were killed in the final stroke of the battle, either incinerated to death or torn up from the shrapnel caused by two tank shells Israeli forces fired directly at the house.
Israel kills its own: the Hannibal directive
A December investigation by Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth revealed that Israel implemented against its own civilians captured on 7 October a version of its Hannibal directive: Israel used overwhelming lethal force even at the risk of killing Israelis along with their Palestinian captors, in order to avoid leaving them alive to be held captive in Gaza, and to avoid having to pay a steep political price for their return.
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