Soldier: Usually the house is circled by soldiers who are positioned so that they are supposed to seal off all possible exits or entrances, identify people who are trying to either enter or leave the house. And then sometimes you knock on the door and sometimes you break down the door.

Interviewer: How do you decide whether to break it or knock?

Soldier: There’s rarely an operational motivation for it. Often, the motivation is practice, meaning we got a breaching tool for the first time; no one knows how to use it, so it is decided that we break into a house now. Usually, I think with one exception where it was clear to me why a breach was necessary; everything was completely random. 

 

With the breaching equipment we have it usually took longer to breach than to knock, meaning it could take three or four minutes and it makes a lot of noise. That means it wasn’t operationally effective. Half of the times we broke the door using these breach mechanisms, by the time the door was broken the people inside the house had already offered to open the door. There was even one time we couldn’t break down the door, it was already damaged so that it couldn’t be opened and we got stuck, meaning the door got stuck and whoever was inside couldn’t open it for us and we couldn’t open it from our side, we had to wait to understand how to break it completely. 

 

We had a giant deputy company commander and at some point, we discovered that when he kicked doors that weren’t very strong, they fell. For example, say we went to a house, one with a relatively large yard right at the entrance to Balata Refugee Camp, we walked down to the house from [the settlement] Yitzhar, arrived at the yard, gathered around, there was a small gate at the entrance closed with a tiny bolt, the kind you could reach your hand around the door and unlock, it’s actually a gate for animals, for a little homestead. Then the Shin Bet [Security Service] officers asked the deputy company commander to break that door and he gave it a serious kick and it fell in entirely. And made a lot of noise, it woke up the people inside the house, we went into the yard, reached the door and when we got to the door they were still busy being excited about how he knocked down the door to the yard, and we managed to just knock on the regular door and wait for it to be opened.