San Francisco Chronicle · San Francisco, California · 15 March 2018
CP-2018-002
Palestinian aid; ‘Hannibal’ directive
Chronicle News Services
Transcribed from the clipping
“Palestinian aid: The United Nations says about $540 million is needed for humanitarian relief in the Palestinian territories in 2018. Jamie McGoldrick, the top U.N. humanitarian coordinator, said Wednesday that 75 percent of that sum is for Gaza, where ‘a man-made tragedy is unfolding daily.’
Gaza has been under an Israeli and Egyptian blockade since the Islamic militant group Hamas took over the territory in 2007. The closure, along with Hamas’ conflicts with Israel and a bitter power struggle with the group’s bitter rival, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, has devastated the economy.
Half the sum is to support emergency projects by UNRWA, the main U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, after Washington slashed its funding this year.
‘Hannibal’ directive: Israel’s government watchdog has taken aim at the military’s ‘Hannibal’ directive — a controversial tactic used when soldiers were abducted. The directive, used most recently during a 2014 war in Gaza, authorized the use of heavy fire if a soldier was abducted, even at the risk of killing the soldier.
During the 2014 war, troops used the Hannibal procedure after soldiers feared militants had captured an officer. Israel unleashed heavy shelling and air strikes on the southern town of Rafah, killing some 100 Palestinians.
In Wednesday’s report, the state comptroller said the directive suffered from a lack of clarity about ‘the value of the abducted soldier’s life.’ It also noted that it did not ‘explicitly’ mention the need to use ‘proportional’ force.”
Context added by this archive
Two items from a world-briefs column, numbered 4 and 5. The second is the Rafah bombardment the Amnesty report in this archive is about, reported here as an Israeli state comptroller’s finding about a lack of clarity.
Cite this clipping
"Palestinian aid; ‘Hannibal’ directive," San Francisco Chronicle, 15 March 2018, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2018-002. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2018-002
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Last updated 2 November 2026
This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1724 to 2023. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.
The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the news agency that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. A city here is where the newspaper was published, not where the story came from, and on most records it was taken from the masthead.
Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-2018-002.
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