After the 1982 Lebanon War Palestinian forces were holding nine IDF soldiers as POWs. Six were held by Fatah (the main faction of the PLO) and three by the pro-Syrian PFLP-GC. In 1983, Israel agreed to free 4,700 Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners, including several high ranking PLO officers, against the six Fatah prisoners. The following year Israel accepted to free another 1,150 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. Many of them were allowed to remain in Israeli controlled territory. The directive According to Haaretz reporter Leibovich-Dar, the background to the formulation of the directive was the capture of two Israeli soldiers during a Hezbollah ambush in South Lebanon in June 1986. Both soldiers presumably died during the attack, and their bodies were returned to Israel in an exchange with Hezbollah in 1996. The authors of the order were the three top officers of the IDF Northern Command, Major General Yossi Peled, the command's operations officer, Colonel Gabi Ashkenazi, and its intelligence officer, Colonel Yaakov Amidror. The order was top secret, and its mere existence was denied by Israeli military authorities. On August 1, 2014, the New York Times reported that Hamas had captured an IDF officer and that the IDF had answered with an assault that killed scores of Palestinians. The "Hannibal Directive" was not mentioned in the article. But the paper was contacted by the Israeli military censor and informed that any material related to the missing officer had to be submitted for prior review before publication. The paper had not been subjected to this level of scrutiny for more than six years. The exact wording of the directive was not known, though Leibovich-Dar claimed that it had been updated several times over the years. The Jerusalem Post Journalist Anshel Pfeffer described the order in 2006 as the "rumored" standard procedure in the eventuality of a kidnap attempt: "soldiers are told, though never officially" the content of this order. Maariv quoted a version of the directive apparently applicable to 2014: "A. During a kidnapping, the main task becomes to rescue our soldiers from the abductors, even at the cost of harming or injuring our soldiers. B. If the abductors and the kidnapped are identified and the calls are not heeded, a firearm must be fired in order to bring the kidnappers to the ground, or arrest them. D.(sic) If the vehicle or the hijackers do not stop, they should be