Soldier: We went to Nablus for an arrest. We arrived there with an Oketz unit [canine unit] and a breaching unit, in order to find weapons, there was information. 

Interviewer: What is a breaching unit?

 

Soldier: Midron Mushlag [the engineering corps’ breaching unit]. So we get there, there was information about weapons in the house, we go inside the house, all of us. When we were unexperienced soldiers, we performed arrests without facemasks on, but once we got it, we started wearing masks. In a way, when you put a facemask on, it makes you anonymous, it’s easier for you to do the things the occupation asks you to do. We went inside the house there, we were told to find weapons. First of all, the family looked pretty poor, you see a family with a lot of kids living in one house with the grandmother. 

 

You go inside the house in the middle of the night and say: men in one room, women in another. The men – they were taken to a room and if they made trouble, we’d handcuff them, and if they didn’t, they were left to just sit. We were in that house and there was a photograph of a kid who must have been killed in something IDF related, he was 15 or 16, maybe younger. [They] said: some Israel Defense Forces, you killed our child, you killed our child. And then some grandmother who was sitting there said: don’t blame them, it’s not their fault. 

 

Interviewer: Did she say it in Hebrew?

 

Soldier: I think she muttered something like that in Hebrew, or maybe I understood from context. But they kind of silenced her. Now the dog with the guy [from the canine unit] came in, the kids were very scared of the dogs [so] they moved the kids farther away from the dogs. This dog was a propellent explosives dog, trained to detect explosives. The dog walked around the house as instructed by his handler, it was wandering around the house sniffing and it didn’t find anything, didn’t find any indication of a scent or anything. An officer or someone from Midron Mushlag, if I’m not mistaken, walked by and started like banging on the wall, where was he supposed to discover explosives? They just took the walls apart, they just broke walls to search for explosives. 

Interviewer: What do you mean broke?

 

Soldier: With a five [kilogram demolition] hammer. 

 

Interviewer: Did they start pounding the walls, breaking holes and searching?

Soldier: Yes, yes, breaking holes in the walls, pounding on the walls. I’m not even mentioning how the house is in ruins because the rooms have been searched, but the clothes were searched pretty neatly. But walls were broken and nothing was found. The family is shouting, angry, why are you breaking our house, we don’t have anything here, I don’t have anything here. And that’s just the way it was. 

 

Interviewer: What do you mean they broke walls? Do you mean a small part of a wall?

Soldier: Not all the walls in the house. There was one hallway where I remember clearly that they just broke the wall, it was a wall that was at least two meters by a meter and a half. They didn’t find anything and like I said, we just left. It didn’t seem strange to us because we were given an indication that there was someone with a weapon in the house, so you have to search for weapons in the house. But there were no weapons, just a family, that’s it. 

 

Interviewer: Did you arrest anyone from the family?

 

Soldier: No, nobody was arrested. 

Interviewer: And what happens during debriefing, say after such an incident, do you talk about what happened?

 

Soldier: Nothing, you don’t talk about it. What is there to say? Nothing bad happened, nothing happened to the soldiers. There’s no need for a debriefing. No, they don’t do a debriefing in such cases.