The “No More Shalits” Doctrine

6 min readJul 26, 2021

Shejaya neighborhood demolished by Israeli Artillery Source: palinfo

The “No More Shalits” Doctrine

Gilad Shalit was an Israeli Defense Force soldier serving on a tank crew in the summer of 2006. Shalit’s group was stationed on the South-Eastern border of the Gaza Strip enforcing the buffer zone — an ever shifting area within Gaza anywhere from 100 meters to one kilometer in width that the IDF keeps clear of Palestinians by using live fire. On June 25th a band of Palestinian fighters used a tunnel to cross over the buffer zone undetected and ambushed Shalit’s tank unit in the shadow of an IDF watchtower. Mortar fire from positions inside Gaza covered the Palestinians attack, Gilad was captured and two of his crew mates were killed by a mixed group of militants from at least three different factions but seemingly under the tactical control of Hamas. The daring raid marked Hamas as a group with advanced operational capabilities and made the IDF seem careless with the lives of soldiers it placed on the border. In the aftermath, there was much blood spilled in the name of freeing Gilad Shalit and much of it would come from Palestinian civilians.

In July of the same year Hizballah would also attempt to capture IDF soldiers stationed along the border with Lebanon, this raid precipitated the brutal 2006 Lebanon war. After 5 years of captivity and silence, the Israel government and Hamas were finally able to reach an agreement that freed the POW. In exchange for Shalit, Israel freed over a thousand militants and Palestinian political prisoners. The Palestinian resistance and specifically Hamas had scored a political victory that in Palestinian eyes far outstripped the unfulfilled promises negotiated by the hapless PLO in the West Bank. Hamas had learned the lessons of their on-again off-again ally Hizballah and forced the Israelis' to make painful concessions. The IDF learned a lesson from this humiliating experience as well; there would be no more Gilad Shalits.

The so called “Hannibal doctrine” originated in the mid-1980s at the start of the IDFs bitter twenty year occupation of Southern Lebanon. A grinding contest against Lebanese Hizballah that the Israeli media often dubbed “Israel’s Vietnam”. Once it became clear that Lebanese resistance groups could extract a high price from Israeli politicians by capturing soldiers, preventing abductions, especially of living soldiers, became a tactical imperative for the IDF. In short, Hannibal directed soldiers to concentrate all available fire on fleeing abductors, even if it meant killing their captured battle brother. This doctrine has reportedly again become the standard operating procedure of the IDF. Although the soldiers who responded to the capture of Gilad Shalit were ordered to fire upon him and his fleeing captors, they limited their fire to “machine guns”. It seems the ensuing pain and embarrassment of Shalit’s capture would rid the IDF of such restraint in the future.

Documents leaked from Stratfor in 2011, in the run up to the release of Gilad Shalit, imply that the “Hannibal protocol” was the standard IDF response to a captured soldier. More recent reports in Haaretz claim that Israeli soldiers are being instructed to pull the pins on their own hand grenades if they are taken captive, hopefully killing their captors as well as themselves. The fratricidal imperative of the Hannibal doctrine would seem to directly contradict the no one gets left behind myth that lies at the heart of the IDF as a citizen army. As Israeli-American essayist and war-crime apologist Jeffrey Goldberg so succinctly put it the IDF has made a solemn “compact” with the people of Israel: “You give us your sons, and we will do whatever we can to keep them alive.” But now the Israeli military has seemingly perverted this promise into a suicide pact in hopes of freeing themselves from the constraints of civil oversight.

Living prisoners of war would demand political compromise to free them, while dead soldiers only demanded revenge.

Does the Hannibal doctrine explain how IDF soldiers Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul were first presumed captured but then later declared dead in 2014? An excellent article by Ali Abunimah and Dena Shunra goes into great detail about the timeline surrounding the capture of Hadar and the subsequent demolition of Rafah by the IDF. Including a chilling detail from an Ynet military reporter that “Hannibal! Hannibal!” was screamed over military comms on that morning when IDF claimed Hadar was captured and Rafah was brutalized by a rain of high explosive and a renewed ground offensive that shattered a cease fire. For its part, Hamas denied the capture although it did acknowledge that its fighter had engaged in heavy fighting with IDF troops encroaching on Rafah.

In the case of Oron Shaul, on July 20th 2014 the Gaza neighborhood of Shejaya was turned into a free fire zone. According to the Jerusalem Post three battalions of IDF artillery decimated at least ten city blocks of Shejaya, killing nearly one hundred Palestinian civilians and wounding over 400. Hamas fighters and other militants were inflicting heavy casualties on one of the IDFs most battle hardened and notoriously brutal combat units, the infantry of the Golani. Shocked and afraid of having to explain “600 body bags” to the Israeli public the military command dispensed with any pretense of distinction or proportion. The Golani troops were ordered to flee into their armored transports as the IDF called fire down on top of them for 20 minutes. The Israeli shelling laid waste to everything in its path, killing scores of civilians and risked the lives of their own troops. At least one of the IDF’s leopard APCs was blasted apart and the body of Oron Shaul was not amongst the dead found inside. While the IDF claims an IED tore open the vehicle, Hamas has only said Oron was captured during the fighting. Days later the IDF officially listed him amongst the dead supposedly due to evidence found with the disabled vehicle.

While specifics are still scarce, it is likely that both soldiers died with their captors under the hellish barrage of their own artillery. What we do know for certain is that in both cases Israeli artillery indiscriminately shelled entire Palestinian neighborhoods without warning, killing hundreds of civilians in an apparent attempt to “rescue” their MIA by turning him into a KIA. For the Israeli military there would be no more Shalits to stay the hand of war and force their politicians to bargain with the Palestinians. It is the triumph of a tactic over strategy. When saving lives becomes indistinguishable from extinguishing them.

Khaldoun Khelil has degrees in International Criminal Justice and International Security Policy. He is a Middle East scholar who has written on numerous issues concerning counter-intelligence, human rights, terrorism, defense policy, and war crimes.

References

Gilad Shalit

Israel’s Vietnam