Saturday, June 27, 2015

Operation Hannibal

By Dan Ephron


On the morning of August 1, 2014, during the broadest Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip in years, a squad of Hamas fighters emerged from a shaft in the ground near the town of Rafah and ambushed three Israeli soldiers. The Israelis, members of an elite reconnaissance unit from the Givati Brigade, had been searching for a tunnel in the area, one of a network that the militant group Hamas had built under the Palestinian territory in recent years. In humid 80-degree heat, a firefight ensued that killed two of the Israelis and one of the Palestinians. It lasted less than a minute.
The war in Gaza, which had raged for three weeks by then and claimed the lives of dozens of Israelis and some 1,500 Palestinians, seemed to be tapering off. The ambush near Rafah would have gone down as one more skirmish. But as the surviving Palestinians retreated, they did something that would turn that Friday into the bloodiest day of the summer and embroil Israel in a possible war-crimes ordeal that reverberates even now: They dragged the third Israeli, Lieutenant Hadar Goldin, with them underground.
The sound of the gunfire drew other Israeli soldiers to the site, including Lieutenant Eitan Fund, the reconnaissance unit’s second-in-command. What Fund saw when he got there — bodies on a sandy road and an opening in the ground a few feet away — filled him with dread. Dead soldiers were disturbing enough, but for Israel, a missing fighter was about the worst possible outcome of any battlefield engagement. The last time Hamas had seized a soldier was in 2006: Corporal Gilad Shalit’s captivity lasted five years and set off a searing national trauma.
Fund, who was 23, had come to know Goldin during an officers’ training course. The two had also studied at the same religious seminary in the West Bank before their service. Fund radioed the details to his brigade commander, Col. Ofer Winter, and asked permission to take a squad underground. Winter instructed the lieutenant to drop a grenade and lower himself in. He then announced over the radio the start of a controversial procedure that Israel deploys when a soldier is taken captive: “Hannibal, Hannibal.”
The story of Hadar Goldin raises one question in particular: How far should a modern military go to prevent one of its own from being captured?
To the military in the United States and around the world, Israel serves as a kind of laboratory for battle tactics, especially those involving counterinsurgency. Its wars with guerrilla groups like Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah — four in the past nine years — are pored over for the lessons they hold and the questions they raise. The story of Hadar Goldin raises one question in particular: How far should a modern military go to prevent one of its own from being captured?
For the United States, the answer has centered mostly on technology. Today’s American troops go into battle with portable computers and GPS devices, including a system known as Blue Force Tracking that allows commanders in Humvees to “see” their forces in the arena. Ground troops are also monitored by satellites and drones. This combination of new technologies has produced a staggering drop in battlefield captives in Afghanistan and Iraq compared with previous wars. But the risks of combat remain great: U.S. Army Sergeant Salvatore Giunta became the first living Medal of Honor recipient in the war in Afghanistan, in part for rescuing a comrade being dragged away by the Taliban during an ambush in 2007.

Massive use of force

Israel has its own technology, of course, but it supplements those tools with a tactic the army revived in the aftermath of the Shalit ordeal — code word Hannibal — that calls for a massive use of force when a soldier is captured. Two Israelis familiar with the wording of the classified procedure described it to me as measured and restrictive. But from conversations with others, including more than a dozen Israelis in and out of uniform, it’s clear that soldiers often interpret it as something less nuanced — a kind of signal from commanders that a dead Israeli fighter is better than a captured one. Fund seemed to share that interpretation. As he entered the shaft, he told one of his squad members: “If you see something, open fire, even if it means killing Hadar or wounding Hadar.” (He recounted the event to Israeli reporters in the days after the war.)
The tunnel was so cramped that the men could only crawl at first. Fund had left his bulky gear behind and taken just a sidearm so that he could maneuver inside. In the beam of his flashlight, he could see the corridor expanding up and out — a paved passageway just high enough for him to stand in. He looked for wires that might suggest it was booby-trapped.
As the men pushed forward, the second soldier in line rested the barrel of his rifle on Fund’s shoulder and pinched off a round whenever he thought he spotted something moving in the dark. The shots rang so close to Fund’s ear that he felt himself losing his hearing. Another soldier who followed Fund into the tunnel told me that he felt spasms of claustrophobia and fear. “I thought these were the last minutes of my life,” he said at his home recently. (The soldier asked to be identified by only his first name and rank, Lieutenant Yair.) “I knew that someone went inside and didn’t come back, and I thought that I’m probably next.”
The soldiers followed a trail of blood through one fork in the tunnel network and then another, pressing deeper and deeper into subterranean Gaza until it was clear after 30 minutes that the Hamas men had outrun them.
Goldin was gone.
Funeral of the kidnapped soldier Hadar Goldin
Funeral of the kidnapped soldier Hadar Goldin | EPA
By the time the Israelis climbed back up the shaft, Hannibal was in full swing. For the next few hours, Israel bombarded several densely populated neighborhoods of Rafah, firing hundreds of shells and mortars and launching airstrikes from warplanes. The bombs hit homes and moving cars. They fell around Rafah’s hospital and at key intersections. Having lost track of its soldier, Israel was now trying to cut off escape routes — but it also seemed to be exacting revenge. In the Israeli press, some analysts would point out that the weaponry could not possibly have distinguished between Goldin and his captors, which perhaps was the point. One way or another, the results of that day would prove devastating: Up to 115 Palestinians dead, according to human rights groups, most of them civilians. Israelis and Palestinians alike would come to refer to it as Black Friday.
Now, nearly a year later, Israeli military lawyers are trying to determine if the Hannibal procedure led soldiers to commit a war crime. The lawyers have a particularly delicate task. Ordering a criminal investigation would put them at odds with the institution they serve. Not ordering one might open the door to a probe by the International Criminal Court.
***
Like so much else about the Hannibal procedure, its very name — the origin of it — is a matter of contention. One of its authors, retired Major General Yaacov Amidror, told me that a military computer generated the term arbitrarily, the way it issued names for other operations. Another Israeli familiar with the process explained that code words meant to be spoken over military radio always get the same first letter as their corresponding terms. Hannibal in Hebrew begins with the letter het, same as the word for captive, hatuf. But the randomness that underpins both explanations feels somehow implausible when you read about the procedure’s namesake. History’s Hannibal was a brilliant Carthaginian military commander who bested the powerful Roman Republic in several battles in the second century B.C. When the Romans closed in, he poisoned himself to avoid being captured.
It’s only a slight exaggeration to say (as Israelis often do) that a missing 19-year-old creates heartache for every Israeli parent.
Israel’s Hannibal was born in the 1980s, drafted by officers after a series of captivity ordeals in southern Lebanon forced Israeli governments to ponder a question ordinarily left to philosophers and actuaries: How much is an individual soldier worth? Israel is a small country with a conscripted army and a shared sense of destiny — certainly among its Jewish citizens. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say (as Israelis often do) that a missing 19-year-old creates heartache for every Israeli parent. “When a soldier is captured, the whole country becomes a shtetl,” says Amos Harel, military analyst for the newspaper Haaretz.
The United States, which had to cope with thousands of POWs in the Korean War and hundreds in Vietnam, learned to impose certain limits on what it would and would not do to retrieve captives. America has launched major rescue operations to retrieve imprisoned troops. And it has awarded its highest military honor to soldiers who prevented their friends from being captured. But U.S. administrations have refused to pay ransom — at least directly — for the release of Americans held by Al Qaeda or the Islamic State, whether soldiers or civilians. When President Barack Obama traded five Taliban members last year for Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, an American serviceman held in Afghanistan for five years, the move ignited a political firestorm, as many political opponents criticized the price as inflated. (It didn’t help that Bergdahl had been captured after apparently walking away from his unit.)
For Israel, though, no price seems too high. In 1983, it released nearly 5,000 Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners in exchange for just six soldiers. Similar deals followed. On several occasions, Israel freed prisoners just to retrieve dead bodies.
The exchanges reinforced the idea that soldiers would not be abandoned, an important message in any military. “When a soldier knows his country will move heaven and earth to get him back, that means a hell of a lot to him,” says Gary Solis, a retired Marine colonel who teaches law at Georgetown University.
Israeli soldier missing as Gaza ceasefire collapses
Israeli soldiers wave an Israeli flag from a Merkava tank in southern Israel | EPA
But commanders worried that the trades also created new incentives for Israel’s enemies. Amidror, who served as a senior intelligence officer at the time (and, more recently, as national security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu), said he realized that Hezbollah in particular had made snatching soldiers a strategic goal. And Israel faced another problem: In the West Bank and Gaza, many of the freed Palestinians were becoming the leaders of a new uprising — the first intifada. “We had to give commanders on the ground some rules about what should be done [when a soldier is grabbed],” Amidror recalls.
The procedure Amidror and two other officers wrote ran several pages long and circulated among the brass above a certain rank. Parts of it dealt with the kinds of weapons and munitions soldiers could deploy and the rules of engagement that applied. The main section guided commanders on how much firepower to use against an enemy squad as it made off with an Israeli soldier. “It’s clear from the procedure that you’re allowed to risk his life but not to kill him,” Amidror told me when we met in Tel Aviv in March. “I agree with you that it’s a fine line,” he added.
Hannibal’s use waned in the 1990s and eventually fell out of use. The Shalit ordeal brought it back with a vengeance. The 19-year-old corporal had been sitting in a tank on the Israeli side of the border with Gaza in June 2006, when Hamas men struck with anti-tank rockets. The guerrillas had burrowed underneath the fence and circled behind the Israeli force. They forced Shalit from his tank and dragged him back into Gaza.
Shalit’s father, Noam, told me that soldiers in another tank had the fleeing guerrillas in their sights but refrained from firing a shell in order to avoid killing his son. To him, it was the right decision. But in the army, the story of Shalit’s capture quickly became a cautionary tale and helped revive Hannibal. If the captivity of one soldier caused anguish for an entire country, gave the enemy huge leverage over Israel and allowed Palestinian militants who had been locked away to rejoin the battle — wasn’t it better to sacrifice that soldier and prevent the ordeal? Asa Kasher, an Israeli philosopher at Tel Aviv University who worked with the army to formulate its ethical code of conduct and also reviewed the Hannibal procedure, says the discourse about the drill among the rank and file turned dark: “Soldiers started talking about it as if … better a dead soldier than an abducted soldier.”
That conviction became so widespread that in 2011, the army’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General Benny Gantz, took time at an operational meeting to review with senior officers precisely what Hannibal did and did not allow. By then, Israel had released more than a thousand prisoners in exchange for Shalit. In televised images of the deal watched by millions of Israelis, Shalit emerged from five years of isolation looking gaunt and bewildered. Hamas had held him in an underground room and booby-trapped the building, according to Israeli media. (Palestinians, of course, have their own trauma from captivity ordeals. Israel has imprisoned tens of thousands of them over the years, some without trial and the rest after military court proceedings that rights groups describe as flawed.)
For Israeli soldiers, the message that penetrated seemed to be that there were two Hannibals — the sanitized version and the one that actually applied on the battlefield. A few weeks before Gantz’s instruction, Israeli media had obtained the leaked recording of a Golani Brigade battalion commander addressing his soldiers ahead of an assault on Gaza: “The strategic weapon, the Judgment Day weapon that Hamas wants to acquire, is to capture a soldier. But no soldier in Battalion 51 will be kidnapped, no matter the price, no matter the situation,” he said. “Even if that means he blows himself up with his grenade along with the people trying to grab him. And even if it means that now his unit has to fire a barrage at the car that they are trying to spirit him away in.”
***
Once soldiers cross that line — that it’s OK to “fire a barrage” at a vehicle carrying their own comrade — psychological barriers to endangering civilians also seem to weaken or disappear.
For Palestinian residents of Rafah, Black Friday actually began quietly — more quietly than any day they had known in weeks. Egyptian officials had helped to negotiate a three-day ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that went into effect at 8 a.m. that morning. Palestinians who had fled their homes earlier in the war and taken refuge at schools and United Nations compounds now streamed back to Rafah — to check on their belongings and wait for the next round of fighting. The Hamas ambush against Goldin and the other two Israelis violated the ceasefire, but residents of the town didn’t know it yet. They learned that the truce had been scrapped only when the first Israeli shells landed.
Israeli soldiers had estimated the path of the tunnel and began hitting buildings along the route, in case shafts emerged into those buildings — a technique the Israelis had known Hamas to use. They also hit cars in the area, assuming any one of them might be transporting Goldin and his captors. As minutes passed, the radius of the bombardment expanded, from one neighborhood to two and then to four.
In the Jnena neighborhood, about a mile from the site of the clash, 26-year-old Wael al-Namla heard the bone-shaking thud of shells striking homes on his block. Fearing his own house would be hit, he took his extended family — 11 people including his wife and two children — into the street, where other residents were also fleeing the attack. The Namlas managed to get several blocks away when two rockets slammed into the crowd, “right on top of us,” he told me months later. Three members of his family died instantly — his 11-year-old sister, his adult brother and his brother’s wife. Others in the street suffered severe burns and lost limbs, injuries that would characterize the fighting that day. Namla and his 3-year-old son each lost a leg. His wife would have to have both her legs amputated.
Israeli spokesmen take pride in the overall measures the army deployed last summer to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza.
I met Namla in March, when he emerged through the Erez border crossing from Gaza into Israel. Members of the group Physicians for Human Rights had arranged for him to get follow-up treatment at a Jerusalem hospital; two of them waited at Erez to pick him up. In the weeks after the injury, Namla had undergone several rounds of surgery at a Palestinian hospital in East Jerusalem. But when he returned to Gaza, he discovered that a bone protruded from his stump and rubbed painfully against his prosthesis. With only limited medical care available in Gaza, he waited months for a permit to enter Israel again in order to get the bone sheared. Now that he had obtained it, Namla hobbled into the parking lot on the Israeli side with metal crutches, then tucked himself into the back seat of an Opel Corsa for the trip to Jerusalem.
On the ride, he ticked off the names of other people killed or injured in Rafah on Black Friday and described homes that had been damaged or destroyed. (Israel puts at around 50 the number of Palestinians killed that day — less than half the total of other estimates — and says about one-third of those killed were combatants.)
Israeli spokesmen take pride in the overall measures the army deployed last summer to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza. Before Black Friday, the army routinely warned residents to evacuate neighborhoods before bombardments or raids. It did so by dropping leaflets from planes, making thousands of robocalls to Palestinian homes and hitting rooftops of buildings with small nonexplosive devices — a procedure Israel calls “roof knocking.” How effective these measures were is a matter of dispute. Breaking the Silence, an Israeli group that collects testimonies from soldiers, described them as inadequate in a report this spring and said the war caused “massive and unprecedented harm to the population and the civilian infrastructure” in Gaza. At least half the Palestinians killed in Gaza were civilians, according to Israel’s own numbers. (Palestinian and U.N. officials put the number at closer to 70 percent.)
Palestinians protest against Israeli settlements in Qadomem Clashes in Nablus
Palestinians and Israeli soldiers clash near the West Bank city of Nablus | EPA
But Israel blames Hamas for putting civilians at risk in the first place — by embedding its fighters and munitions in heavily populated areas, firing rockets at Israel from behind buildings and digging tunnels from inside homes and even mosques (some extending under the border and into Israel). In the ongoing argument over which side bears greater responsibility, the head of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, weighed in last year on Israel’s behalf, saying “Israel went to extraordinary lengths to limit … civilian casualties.” He also sent a team to Israel for a “lessons learned” trip after the war.
In the assault on Rafah, however, Israel took none of those measures — there was no time. And in the aftermath, the question for lawyers centers on whether Israel’s response was reasonable. Did killing so many Palestinians in a bid to rescue a single Israeli soldier or to prevent him from being captured violate the principle of proportionality? And would the answer be the same if it turned out that commanders had somehow let the rescue morph into a mission to kill their own soldier in order to save Israel from another captive ordeal?
The Israeli charged with deciding whether to launch criminal proceedings is Major General Danny Efroni, the army’s military advocate general. In an interview at his Tel Aviv office in March, Efroni emphasized that Hannibal could not serve as an excuse for lawlessness: “It’s not an open check for soldiers to do whatever they want to do.” He revealed that his investigators had compiled a thick report on the events of Black Friday, which he and his staff had already read. But he would not say when he expected to make a decision. “It’s a very sensitive situation for the soldiers and units that were involved,” he said. “It’s not an easy one, it’s not a regular situation.”  Efroni said he had already initiated 19 criminal cases stemming from the war over the summer, including an incident in which Israeli shells killed four Palestinian children on a Gaza beach.
Those who kidnap need to know they will pay a price. This was not revenge. They simply messed with the wrong brigade.
Politically, Efroni would make life easier on himself if he closed the Rafah case. Earlier this year, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon effectively upstaged him by declaring publicly that there was no room for a criminal investigation in the matter. (Efroni points out that, under army regulations, the military advocate general is not in the defense minister’s chain of command.) But a military investigation might also have an advantage for Israel. It would shield the army from a probe by the International Criminal Court, which can insert itself in such cases only when countries fail to examine their own alleged misdeeds. Israel has grown increasingly worried about international prosecutions since the Palestinian Authority joined the ICC earlier this year. A U.N. Human Rights Council report on the war in Gaza, published this month, could be the catalyst for an ICC investigation. The report determined that both Israel and the Palestinians violated international laws during last year’s conflict and might have committed war crimes.
Ultimately, however, the Givati officers who oversaw the assault on Rafah might pose the biggest impediment to just quashing the probe.
Several of them gave surprisingly candid interviews to the Israeli media in the weeks that followed Black Friday, including comments that would suggest the unit went beyond legal norms. Colonel Ofer Winter, the Givati Brigade commander, told the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth: “Those who kidnap need to know they will pay a price. This was not revenge. They simply messed with the wrong brigade.” One of the unit’s battalion commanders, Lieutenant Col. Eli Gino, said in a separate interview with the newspaper: “When your soldier is captured, all the means are kosher, even if it exacts a price.” And an officer serving under Gino, who preferred not to be named — so as not to be prosecuted by the ICC, according to Yedioth Ahronoth — described the attack on Rafah as “an aggressive and overwhelming” assault. “In an event like this, you do everything you can not to plunge the country into another Shalit whirlwind,” he said.
***
Hadar Goldin’s mother, Leah, heard about the collapse of the truce in Rafah that Friday morning on the radio news. Although tens of thousands of soldiers had been operating in Gaza throughout the war, somehow she sensed that one of her sons — either Hadar or his twin brother, Tzur — was involved and went into a panic. Leah’s two older children had served as officers in the army. Her husband, Simha, was a reserve lieutenant colonel (he’s a university professor, and Leah is a software engineer). “They’re all officers, but I’m the chief of staff [in the family],” she told me during an interview at her home in March.
An hour after the radio report, soldiers from a personnel unit in the army showed up at Leah’s door and, reading lines from a typed page, informed her that her son had gone missing in battle. “Which one?” she wanted to know.
For a long night and day, the Goldins clung to the hope that their son had survived the ambush and would be found somewhere in Rafah.
By early afternoon Friday, the rest of the family congregated at the house in Kfar Saba, a middle-class suburb of Tel Aviv. As word spread of the ordeal, hundreds of Israelis gathered outside the five-story building for a vigil. Tzur, who served in a rescue unit in the Paratroopers Brigade, had been posted less than a half-mile from the site of the ambush that hit his twin. His commanders had radioed him to head to the area and help with the search. But when they realized the missing soldier was actually Tzur’s brother, they pulled him back, explained what happened and sent him home.
For a long night and day, the Goldins clung to the hope that their son had survived the ambush and would be found somewhere in Rafah. As observant Jews, the family had shut off all electrical appliances on Friday night, including television sets and computers. But around midday Saturday, Simha decided to “cancel the Sabbath” — as he described it to me — in order to read updates online. With no news on the fate of his son, he and Leah now worried that Prime Minister Netanyahu would call off the three-week-old ground operation in Gaza and withdraw the troops. That evening, 36 hours after the ambush, the family stepped outside their building and addressed a line of journalists. “I demand that Israel refrain from leaving Gaza until it can bring my son home,” Leah Goldin said. Simha suggested that Tzur had that quasi-telepathic connection with his brother that only twins can have — and felt sure Hadar was alive.
In fact, by then it was clear to both the army and the government that Hadar was not alive. In the tunnel the previous day, Lieutenant Fund had picked up certain items belonging to Goldin — perhaps pieces of his uniform or gear or even small physical remains. (Army spokesmen declined to specify, describing them only as “findings.”) The army then sent the materials to Israel’s pathology institute for analysis. Sometime over the weekend, an answer came back: Goldin could not have survived his wounds.
Officials broke the news to the family late Saturday night.
In my interview with the Goldins months later, Simha and Leah ruled out the idea that Hannibal had been about anything but retrieving their son. “What we know is that the procedure was activated … in order to rescue him,” Simha Goldin said. “The whole assault was in order to rescue him. We heard this from … soldiers who were there.” Although they held a funeral for Hadar Goldin at the end of that weekend, they said they were still waiting to get back his remains and bury them, an important ritual in Judaism. Simha said the Netanyahu government promised the family it would block all reconstruction projects in the Gaza Strip until Hamas agreed to hand over the body.
But Hamas is unlikely to do that without getting something substantial in return. In the long saga of captivity ordeals, Israel has made clear to its enemies that even a body can be a bargaining chip. It has traded prisoners for the remains of Israeli soldiers several times in the past two decades — and will likely do so again for Goldin. Hannibal certainly raised the cost of taking an Israeli captive. But for all the controversy it aroused and the death and destruction it wrought, it won’t bring an end to Israel’s repeated national traumas over captured soldiers.

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