Testimonies
Searching and Capturing of Houses
a lesson because of a three year old
Name: *** Rank: first sergeant Unit: Nachal elite unite Description: There was this one case where we went in live, and a mother had forgotten her 3-year old son in the room.
What actually happened?
It was a live entry into a building. Evacuating everyone and searching the whole building. This is just the worst, because you have to go into every home, get all the people out. Everyone waits downstairs, the kids cry, absolute mayhem. People have to be moved outside, we have to take care not to injure civilians, treat them nicely, and watch out not to be killed yourself. (…)
You go over the whole building? Going live through the whole place?
Yes. Sometimes it's specific floors, at others it's not specific. It depends. (…) Anyway, they went in, sprayed a home, suddenly some woman got hysterical: "My son, my son"… After the man-search they conducted a weapons search and suddenly saw a little 3-year old kid lying terrified under a bed and let her go. What insane luck he had, not getting killed. Don't worry, later we improved our shooting too, because in fact this was an operational mistake, because just as he had been curled up there… It wasn't an operational mistake because we didn't want to kill him, but it shows you that if there had been a little terrorist then we wouldn't have hit him and he would have sprayed us. So later we improved our practice and little children were no longer hiding under beds. This case did shake us a bit.
What did it do to your unit?
It focused our procedures. Since then, when you shoot at a bed, one soldier lifts the bed while the other shoots. Or you shoot in a very specific way at beds or sofas. These are practices that I know the army now really sticks to. Everything we learned we passed on inside the army. There was a nice folder of lessons-learnt from our operations. What did it do to the unit? Other cases were carried out by the unit.
Searching and Capturing of Houses
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