Soldier: We went into the house, we were 15 soldiers, knocking or not knocking on the door, I think we did knock and we’d say, we don’t speak Arabic, we tell them to call the whole family, these are relatively large houses but they’re pretty rich in this area. We call everyone, I really didn’t like it, but it was like a kind of a period, when I really felt we were just entering people’s homes and taking the kids, house after house. 

 

What happened was there were a few children there, a few women, an older man and an older woman. There was one man there. I called everyone to go into one place. And then I told my soldiers like: go do a search. Really, they went to turn the house upside down. 

 

In the meantime, this family, I said right, I’ll stay with the family and I don’t want anyone else staying with them, like so I could see they were fine. I’ll like guard them. Then, I’m like, aiming my weapon at them, so they don’t startle me or something like that, and they start speaking Arabic to me, and they try to tell me something; the older man is trying to tell me something, and I don’t understand Arabic; there’s no one who knows Arabic. In the meantime, they [the soldiers] are searching and I say, I don’t understand, I don’t understand. They [the Palestinians in the house] repeat it again and again and again, trying to tell me something and I like don’t understand. And it gets frustrating at some point, and I feel that they, that it’s not calm, so I tell them to shut up at some point, and I point my weapon at them, so they shut up. 

 

They [the soldiers] are performing the search and I’m making sure that they stay there. And then after about say 20 minutes or so, most of the soldiers come back and they tell me they haven’t found a suspect, and this family is stressed out and all the soldiers are next to them again and it got chaotic and I didn’t like that. In the meantime, they [the Palestinians] start up again, the family is really crying and telling they want - and I don’t understand what they want. Then the old man gets up and I tell him to sit and he starts seizing, he was having an epileptic seizure and I realized they wanted to bring him his medicine and I didn’t agree, I told them to shut their mouths, shut their mouths, and they tried to explain it to me and I don’t understand Arabic and I really got scared, I got goosebumps and he was shaking on the floor, I didn’t know what to do. 

 

And the old woman starts crying and ripped her shirt, as though he were dead and she’s looking at me like I murdered him, and I was just in shock. I was wondering what I should do and he was choking and his whole family was crying hysterically and I was thinking, I called the Red Crescent, the ambulance, it took time [for them to arrive]. And you also know it’s all checkpoints out there, it’s all army out there. It took a little while for the ambulance to arrive and the family is like, I’m not letting them move and he’s lying there and the ambulance arrives and by that time he’s like not breathing or I don’t know what condition he’s in, I felt like really, I couldn’t understand whether he was dead or alive. 

 

They took him away and I remember them looking at me, and the way we felt during those moments stayed with me for a while, and I was very angry at myself, like all they really wanted was for me to let them bring his medicine and I wouldn’t let them, I told them to shut up and that was the decision I made at that moment as the commander. You choose the house randomly anyway. 

 

Interviewer: How did the incident end? Was he taken by the ambulance?

Soldier: The ambulance took him. In the end nothing came out of it, but what did happen was that this family must have experienced pretty serious trauma and if I were a kid, knowing that my family is a pretty normal family that hasn’t done anything bad to anyone, and if 20 soldiers were to come into my house and make a huge mess, emptying drawers, and if someone aimed a weapon at me and then I saw my grandfather humiliate himself like that, that’s definitely an experience you remember for the rest of your life, it’s traumatic and this certainly isn’t the only time such a thing happened. It was really painful because it was unnecessary.