A) When Hannibal made his oath to his father that he would always fight the Romans, Hamilcar was holding young Hannibal over a fire pit sacred to Ba'al in the event he might say "No Dad"
For A... where on earth did you hear that??? Salammbo, or something? (haven't read it, but I understand that Hannibal is nearly sacrificed in it, so...)
The usual story with Hannibal and Hamilcar and the sacrificial chamber where he promised to fight to destroy Rome usually involves Hannibal
wantingto go to Spain with his father, and swearing this in front of a sacrificial victim (probably an ox or something), NOT him being dangled over a fire until he does what his father says. Livy says this, a man who isn't exactly Hannibal's greatest PR man. If he really wanted to make Hamilcar and Carthage look bad and evil and all that, he could've did that right there.
Anyways, more to the point, sometimes seemed too odd of an answer to me - you can either put human sacrifice in your story or not, if it's included, then it is - so that's why I ended up voting yes, even though I'm probably closer to the "sometimes" on the poll. Look, human sacrifice is not
totally proven, but it seems to me that it is much more likely that it did happen then didn't. It's fairly well established that it happened in Tyre and other Phoenician cities, and there's no reason to believe it didn't extend to the Daughter City. There is the evidence Cook mentioned that Goldsworthy mentions, and Miles comes to a similar conclusion despite for much of his book attacking ancient Greek and Roman historians for propagandizing against Carthage (much of which is wholly valid, I will say). In fact, Miles quotes a stele that says:
It was to the Lady Tanit Face of Ba'al and to Ba'al Hammon that Bomilcar son of Hanno, grandson of Milkiathon, vowed this son of his own flesh. Bless him you!
That seems rather like child sacrifice to me.
As to what child sacrifice was actually like (assuming that it is true, of course), it seems that many of the children that may have been sacrificed were of the wealthy, which is interesting - you'd think that the lower classes would be the ones to sacrifice their children, especially in Carthage, where there was a small and distinct highest class, and a very large lower class. So it seems to me that a fair amount of it must have been individual efforts to cure times of familial trouble or something. On the state level, it seems to have been done to cure the city of recent plagues - literal, or more figurative ones like poorly-going wars against the Romans and Greeks and whatnot. In either case, it was probably a last resort sort of thing - like the quote above suggests, Carthaginian families did love their children and wouldn't have been particularly keen to sacrifice their children for many reasons (crazily enough, they weren't monsters!), so it'd have to be something really bad that needs a lot of divine help to get Carthage or the individual family out of. So it probably wouldn't be too common. But it would happen.