Testimonies
Searching and Capturing of Houses
Questions without answers
Rank: Staff sergeant Unit: Orev elite unit – Nahal brigade Description: We came for an operation in Tul-Karem. We were at Beit-lid. They prepare us for thirty days; we are placed inside armored troops carriers, as a team of sergeants. Entering houses in Nur-A’Shams. We get the orders in Beit lid, and do not really understand what is going on: because they say something, to seize houses, and we don’t really know what is happening and what we are supposed to do. This is the first time we get into the cities. I was shocked by this order. Even when I tried to ask questions, I only got ignored.
What was the order?
There was this order to seize houses, to evacuate the families, to send them who knows where, and we couldn’t really understand. [Seize] ‘territories from which you can easily govern the area’ that’s was the slogan. That’s it. Back then, we didn’t really understand what that meant, where it came from, what, why, who, shmoo. We tried to ask. But I only got ignored. And there is this thing I brought you. I tried sending this question to the chief military legal council.
Was that before you went on this operation?
The answer came back a lot later.
What was the question?
It was all kinds of worries about this order, what its source was, what it relies on. The answer is, as usual, as all other answers. And it arrived three months late. When I approached my officer, he only mocked me for half an hour, saying: “what do you think, that the prime minister gives illegal orders? Where did you get this notion from?”… The more there were questions, the more the doubt crept in, regarding what we were doing there, and about the timing. We were just a political tool. That means that two days after a terrorist attack, we enter; 30 days collective punishment… and we don’t understand why we have to do that, and why send people who haven’t done anything outside their houses. And that’s where I lost my naivety. That’s when I understood – through my questions and the answers I received from the commanding officers at the unit base – I understood there was no one to talk to.
What was the chief military legal council’s answer?
He said the order was legally based upon a regulation from 1904. That was his very short answer. 1907, Hague regulations, section something something, which says private property can be seized in military circumstances. Something unclear like that. I understood I don’t have anyone to talk to, because I got the same answer by insanely going over the heads of my commanders [and directly approaching some high officer].
So we get an order to go into refugee camps. Al-Amri, I think. There was this order that we are now supposed to go into a different refugee camp every week; to “go through it”. ‘Go through it’ means searching it thoroughly and all. We were cynical about it, and called it ‘Aktzia’ [term naming the evacuations of European Jewish Ghettoes during second world war]. We would come and get all the men – from 15 to 50 (there were always all kinds of numbers) – to the school building. Everyone to the school building, and we had them there all day. We were left with the women and children and passed from house to house with maps – searching every house. We – god boys – open the cupboards, look, move something aside, move it back… All day long. And that day was the [soccer] world cup final. And it was terribly hot. And we go around the place – as usual in this kind of operations, we don’t find anything. Our officer was all the time trying to… we went a team of five, to explode every door. But it was, as if it was, secretive. Not really, just to train our exploding skills. So we would learn a bit. And also he was exited by the soccer game: every door which was a bit hard to open – even thought we had tools for ‘cold entry’ [which does not involve explosives], a hammer, and everything – we had to blow up. A door that took more than thirty seconds [he would want us to blow up]… We would argue with him. We tried to tell him “There was no need, it’ll open in two minutes, there is nothing suspicious about the place anyway.” It got to the point we yelled: – Not to blow up. – Yes to blow up! Shut up already; don’t interrupt the work.
What do you blow a door up with?
With explosive fingers and threads.
Meanwhile, it is noon. It gets hotter, we want to make more progress, and we want to finish. And again, as always, it comes from the officer. He starts making a mess, entering rooms, he is fed up. He makes a mess. We got to this absurd situation, when we went behind him putting things back in place and tidying up after him. In my own experience it mostly comes from the commanders. Every bit of “limit-crossing”, every bit of “doing it just because” mostly comes from the commanders. That day was just disgusting. We found ourselves watching the world cup final game with this miserable woman and a child. We sat there in their living room, inside the refugee camp. I was too tired, because of all the stair cases; I wasn’t… I didn’t even get a glimpse. I was wrecked. They talk to each other on the radio, “cool!”, “goal!”, here, there. A totally surreal scene. When I think about it now – a friend pointed that out, but I didn’t notice it so much at the time – The World Cup finals is like a holiday. On that day you send … how many men are there in a refugee camp? 6,000? You send them all to the school building [the detention point] and they are punished; it doesn’t matter what the situation is. Same thing they do now, they have a Hudna [truce] for the Olympics. A little bit of sensitivity. It doesn’t matter. Just a trivial thing.
Searching and Capturing of Houses
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