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Over
the last year ‘Breaking the Silence’ has collected testimonies given
by hundreds of IOF (Israeli Defense Forces) soldiers who served in
the territories during the last conflict. These testimonies reveal
the impossible reality those soldiers have to face, and the terrible
moral price this reality demands. Selected collections from those
testimonies have been published in testimonial collections produced
by ‘Breaking the Silence’.
The
present collection is not just one more testimonial-collection,
revealing the brutal routine of the territories’ reality, or the
constant moral degradation and erosion of soldiers’ values. The
collection focuses on IOF orders, rules of engagement and
operational procedures. It presents a grave picture of evidently
illegal orders given frequently, and in different times and places:
firing at civilians who pose no risk, revenge operations,
intentionally shooting at rescue-forces, and more. This collection
reveals the depth of the military administration’s moral corruption,
and the dimness of moral sense, which has spread to the highest
ranks. The testimonies in this collection concerns various units
that were operative in the territories in different times and at
different places, and is thus an evidence for the magnitude of the
moral decay, and for the depths to which flawed norms have diffused.
It
is also apparent that the IOF’s self-inspection system has failed to
fulfill its duty. This also applies to the civilian and
parliamentary inspection mechanisms, which, during the last
confrontations, have consistently refrained from criticizing the
army’s mode of conduct in general, and its rules of engagement in
particular. This brings out sharply an urgent need to create a
platform on which the information we have gathered here can be
presented, in order to examine what this information teaches, as
well as the IOF’s mode of conduct during the last confrontations. A
civilized and decent society cannot survive without a continuous
inspection and criticism of the most powerful organization operating
within it. ‘Breaking the Silence’ is therefore calling for the
establishment of an independent public inspection committee, which
will enable a responsible disclosure and examination of the facts.
Listening and taking responsibility is the very least that is
required of society and its representatives in a civilized and
decent society founded on basic moral values.
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.
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