- Breaking the Silence - http://www.shovrimshtika.org/index_e.asp
Quoted in
Israeli Ex-Soldier Defends Her Facebook Snapshots
This interview appeared in The Lede, NYT Blog Aug 17 2010______________________________
Rank: First Sergeant
Place of incident: Nablus
Description:
End of 2003
Let’s start with the things you want to tell, the things lying heavy on your heart. I ask you to tell everything, what happened, how you felt, what do you think now…
What disturbs me most, and what bothers me most is the lack of value of human life in the OT (occupied territories).Of course not that of Israelis. When my friend was killed, I caught myself suddenly saying ‘Wallah’ (exclamation of surprise) here’s a man gone, in the middle of his life. A person who’s life has stopped. All the aspects of a human being: his aspirations, what he was, what he said, the happy moments of his life, his friends. A man’s life has lots of aspects, and all of a sudden, everything stopped. And then it dawned on me that this was the death of a human being and that you start thinking ‘Wallah’ what about all these people we killed ? And my team killed….innocent people, or at least apparently innocent people. Some were killed by mistake, really by mistake. But what’s a mistake? Really—say ‘we are sorry’. We killed your husband, your daughter, your child or your grandfather or whoever else. And there were those executed on orders that, in my opinion, were illegal. As I told you, the most disturbing thing to me is that there is an absolutely Wild West in the OT. Brigade Commanders, Regiment Commanders and Company Commanders do whatever comes to their mind. No one checks them, and no one stops them. We got in- for many nights in the (Nablus) casbah - and our firing orders were: between 2 to 4(AM) anybody spotted in the casbah, is doomed to die. These were the words: ‘doomed to die’.
Who spoke these words ?
Words we heard from the CC (Company Commander) in the briefing. The CC gave us a briefing before every mission. Sometimes he said between 2 and 4 whoever wanders around the casbah is doomed to die, or sometimes between 1 and 3: doomed to die.
Our team entered (the casbah) and took over a building. From this building we advanced in a worm-like fashion, you know, blowing up a wall, going from house to house, blowing up another wall and entering another building. Like a worm, in the casbah and at Balata (refugee camp), that are highly crowded areas, avoiding crossing the alleys that were a ‘killing zone’. Whenever you crossed one of these alleys your chances of coming out alive were not good. Therefore we developed a tactic of avoiding the alleys altogether and passing through walls of buildings. As buildings are very close to each other, and have mutual walls. So you take a dynamite brick, attach it to a wall, explode it, and climb through the hole in the wall. This is a very slow advance. When you reach a strategic building, commanding its surroundings, you set up a post there to observe the surrounding alleys and roof tops.
What do you do with the family in the ‘strategic’ building?
I know all the stories, and heard from here to eternity about the non-human treatment of these families, and all sorts of plunder. I want to state here for the protocol that in my unit there wasn’t anything like it. We were always… we blew a hole in a wall, we entered homes, we gathered the entire family, not by shouting, but quietly. We tried to calm them down. Placed them in a room, we locked them up and placed a guard. Every time they had to use the toilet, they asked us, and they did with someone accompanying them. We moved furniture aside, sat on the floor, took up positions, built MG and sharpshooter positions in the highest windows or rooftops.
This means that destruction of a house entered by our forces only meant destruction of only a wall?
Yes, in the operation ‘Defensive Shield’, only destruction of a wall. After that things changed. During ‘Defensive Shield’ we cleaned up houses. The houses we left were cleaned. We made sure to clean it. That was the way with my team.
[….]
I don’t remember how long it took to conquer the entire casbah, maybe a week, maybe two. It happened during the battle of the casbah. We entered, continued advancing in the ‘worm fashion’, took over a strategic building, set up positions there, and one of the sharpshooters identified a man on the roof. The man was on a roof about two roofs away from us. I think he was between 50 to 70 m from the sharpshooter. Unarmed, I looked at the man with a night vision binocular. He was unarmed. It was 2AM: an unarmed man on a rooftop, turning around. We reported it to the PC (Platoon Commander) who ordered ‘Take him down’. He (the sharpshooter) shot and took him down. The PC, in a radioed message, actually sealed the man’s fate to die. An unarmed man!
Did you see that he was unarmed?
I saw with my own eyes that the man was unarmed. He (the sharpshooter) also reported… the report said: ‘an unarmed man on the roof’. The PC interpreted it that the man was an observer. He interpreted that the man was an observer, meaning the man was not directly threatening us, and he ordered us to shoot the man and we did it…I myself didn’t shoot, a fellow soldier shot and killed him. And you start thinking that in the US death sentences are imposed, and on every sentence there are thousands of appeals, as they take it very seriously, judges, academically trained people, and there are demonstrations, and so on. Actually a 26-year-old man, my PC, imposed a death sentence on an unarmed man. Who was he? What’s that ‘an observer?’ So what? Is that enough of a reason to kill him? And how did he know he was an observer? He obviously didn’t know. All he knew was that there was an unarmed man on top of the roof, and he ordered to kill him, which, in my opinion was an illegitimate order, and we carried the order out, and killed a human being. The man died. In my opinion that was outright murder. And that wasn’t the only case.
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