Mainstream Reliance on the UN/HRC Report for the “Hamas Killed 1,200” Claim
By Chris S Friel

"We challenge the UN/HRC’s June 2024 report, Detailed Findings on Attacks Carried Out on and After 7 October 2023 in Israel, for downplaying evidence that Israeli forces killed many Israelis that day, a phenomenon has been called a “Mass Hannibal.” While the report asserts that Hamas was responsible for many deaths—a claim we do not dispute—it obscures the significant role of Israeli actions in many other casualties Mainstream outlets like the BBC and Channel 4 rely on the report, often stating unequivocally that “Hamas killed 1,200 people.” We argue this is misleading, as the report never explicitly makes such a finding, and in any case, it fails to fully acknowledge Israel’s responsibility. Through a close textual analysis of the report, we will demonstrate these omissions and errors and misreadings..."

"Summary and Conclusions
In this long and uneven compilation of our research on the Hannibal Directive we have tried to put together a resource for journalists to take up what we believe are many human stories that
have so far been neglected.

When Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October it is certainly true that many crimes were committed.
Hamas attacked military bases and kibbutzim, and caught up in all this was the chaos of those
fleeing the music festival. By around 9.30 that morning Hamas social media started showing
images of Israeli captives, and certainly by noon Israel responded by a “mass Hannibal,”
particularly in the border region where it is clear that many people were burnt to death by heavy weapons systems in the border region. Although this truth was clear to some from the
beginning, at first the idea was regarded as a conspiracy theory, and perhaps the fact that many
wild stories grabbed the headlines, careful journalistic scrutiny was lacking. The result was the false narrative that Hamas had killed all of the 1400/1200 who had died. But we have presented
a careful chronology of how the truth came to be grudgingly accepted, and provided cogent
reasons for believing that the scale must have been immense: from the dramatic effects we can
infer dramatic causes and side effects including hundreds of destroyed cars, hundreds of bunt
Palestinians mistaken for Israelis, and a spiking death toll as bodies were recovered from the
border region. From this we can infer in advance that the scale was immense, and it is entirely
reasonable to think that of every two hostages taken just one managed to arrive in Gaza safely.
This suggests a total of 200 to 300 “friendly fire” deaths in the unacknowledged abductions
alone.

This expectation is amply corroborated if one looks in detail at the individual biographies, and
we have counted nearly 250 likely candidates (listed below) that were not recovered early on
and who in some instances show clear signs of kidnapping. Worse, in multiple instances we
have found crazy or casual lies used to deceive the families that have remained unscathed by
the most rudimentary cross-checking. So it is that the biggest lie regarding the mainstream
coverage has been accompanied by a complete absence of journalistic due diligence. Hopefully,
this resource can go some way to setting the record straight.

And surely the record will be set straight. Families have been deceived in a crude and clumsy
fashion that in the long term, after the remaining hostage situation has been terminated in one
way or another, will surely prove unsustainable.

As ever, truth is the daughter of time; hard truths the children of hard times."

Appendix:
AI Summary: List of Likely Hannibal Directive Candidates

Extended List of Likely Hannibal Directive Casualties Across
Nova, Psyduck, Be’eri, Kfar Aza, and Nir Oz
The following individuals are identified as likely victims of the Hannibal Directive implemented
on October 7, 2023, based on evidence such as late body recovery, indications of heavy
weapons use by the Israeli Air Force (IAF) or tanks (e.g., burnt or unrecognizable remains),
kidnapping indicators (e.g., phones traced to Gaza, missing for days or weeks), or fabricated
narratives suggesting cover-ups (e.g., the “ambulance of death” scam, suspicious
archaeological “discoveries,” or inconsistent accounts). The list covers victims from the Nova
music festival, the Psyduck rave, and the kibbutzim of Be’eri, Kfar Aza, and Nir Oz, as detailed in the essay. Each entry provides details of the incident, evidence supporting their inclusion, and burial information where specified. The essay’s methodology—focusing on late recoveries and discrepancies in official accounts—is applied consistently across all locations to identify unacknowledged abductees likely killed by Israeli forces in the border region, described as an “extermination zone” where the IAF was ordered to “gun down anything that moved...”

https://www.academia.edu/143218672/Mainstream_Reliance_on_the_UN_HRC_Report_for_the_Hamas_Killed_1_200_Claim