Beit-Sahour Blog

The Fifth and sixth Testimony

The fifth



A War, Kind Of



The witness: An officer of an elite unit.

The Location: A Palestinian checkpoint north of Halamish (a West Bank settlement)

Date: 2001- End of summer

Description:
I remember one evening something ‘from the movies’ showed up (Something unbelievably fantastic, as if from the movies, IEN): to go to the check point north of Halamish, I don’t remember exactly the name of the checkpoint, and kill a few Palestinian policemen there.

About when was that?

Sometime in the summer of 2001.

The end of summer 2001?

Yes, something like it.

End of summer?

End or middle.

As if ‘what the fuck’ as it‘s called, what was the story? I don’t remember if there was any attack or something like it.

You were just given an order?

In a briefing, I actually wasn’t in the squad that was to do it, there was something about sharpshooters and other garbage. I don’t remember why I wasn’t part of the squad at that time.

But you were there, with it, when you were given the task?

Yes, but I don’t remember the order, and I don’t want just to blabber. But I clearly remember that was one of the first things I said to myself and I remember that I also said it to my platoon comander later (not there) that the thing appeared to me totally unreal.

The idea was to get to the checkpoint, to kill all the Palestinian policemen at the site?

To kill the Policemen and then have a tank destroy the checkpoint.

Was it carried out?

No. To charge them with something, I don’t know what. Finally, it wasn’t carried out. In short, I don’t know much about it. We were sent one night to an observation point (or ambush) (to catch) some infiltrators. That was my first experience where, for me, two things happened: I understood that, without judging, something (we were supposed to do) didn’t quite make sense to me, and for the first time I also spoke up.

What were you told when you spoke up?

The usual replies, in this case our platoon commander wasn’t really someone you’d expect to…

What do you mean by ‘usual replies’? Something in the style of tasks?

Yes. We do whatever we are told to do. We don’t select our tasks, it’s war here and there



The sixth

The Wild West at the Nablus Kasbah



The witness: 1st Sergeant

The Location: Nablus

Date: End of 2003

Description:
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.

An operation was in progress, we entered the casbah, for a ‘Straw Widow’, and set up posts there. We set up an MG position in the main street of the casbah. Firing orders were: Anybody walking around the casbah at night was to be shot and killed. The order was given us in a briefing by the squad commander. From what he told us, the order originated with the ‘Shomron’ Brigade Commander.

Are we talking about ‘Defensive Shield’?

No. That happened much later, approximately during December 2003 – January 2004. In short- that’s the order. And that’s not an order that appeared suddenly. The same order was given many times. Often the firing order said that anybody walking around….How did he know? And the answer was always: the info comes from the Shabak (the secret General Security Service). Info of the Shabak? How did the Shabak know that Ahmed the baker or Salim the carpenter didn’t have to get up at 3 AM, or at any other hour- I don’t know- for work? How did they know who walks around in the street? And these were the instructions. These were the exact words of our briefings. Whoever walks around in the casbah between that and that hour was to die. These were the exact words. And we entered a ‘Straw Widow’, the ‘Straw widow’ you enter at night secretly. You enter a building, gather the family in one of the rooms, set up sharpshooter positions in the windows, without the area’s knowledge. Without the knowledge of the surrounding population. And in the morning you place a bait. Jeeps are deployed as bait to draw fire from ‘the armed’. And the armed respond and fire on the jeeps. And then, as we spot the ‘armed’ we take them down. That’s the idea. The main activity from ‘Straw Widows’ is in the morning hours, when the confusion starts. But this night, the house was very…. with a very good position, we had used several times before, as it dominates over the whole casbah. Actually not the whole casbah, but a good part of it. It happened at 4AM, don’t remember…we entered at 2AM and at 4AM the sharpshooter’s position, of which I was part, identified a man carrying a bag. I, too, saw the man this time. The man walks on Jama Al Kabir (name of street) carrying a bag in his hand, between 3AM and 4AM. Don’t remember. Important though, was the fact that the man was spotted carrying a bag in his hand. When this was reported to the squad commander and to the PC, the order was given to ‘take him down’. He was shot and taken down. Killed. A man fell. Something in order of 70 m from the house. Then the jeep of the PC’s CP (Command post) came and ‘confirmed kill’. A really brutal ‘confirm kill’: throwing two grenades on the body that smashed it completely. Then they opened the bag to see what’s in it and found: pitot (pitah breads). Pitot.

I ask you again on ‘confirm kill’. The Army spokesman denies that there is such a thing as ‘confirm kill’ in our army.

‘Confirm kill ‘ is that when you kill a person from a distance and he falls, you come to confirm that you finished the work. In short the PC’s CP jeep came, threw on it some grenades, shot him (again), opened the bag, and found pitot in the bag. After that, I remember, our Regiment Commander summed the operation up. Again, this thing (the killing) was never investigated. It was simply passed on, as if nothing had happened. The regular debriefing is held, after every operation there is a debriefing, summary and conclusions are printed, or something like it, no guilty ones were ever identified. Life is totally cheap, people die… In short, the man died, after that the Regiment Commander in his operational summary cheers us up: ‘Listen, guys, don’t be demoralized, this man wasn’t just walking around there innocently’. Of course he (the Regiment commander), didn’t have any substantive information – evidence, ‘be assured that anyone walking around in the casbah at that hour is no ‘big friend of Zion’. He probably had a terrorist agenda and you performed a good job. With all respect we never heard anymore about it. I guess, and my instinct tells me, this man was innocent. Of course it’s always possible that the Regiment Commander knew things we didn’t. In any case, we never heard anything else about this case.