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catalog number: 579437
Unit: Civil Administration
Area: Jericho and the Jordan valley
period: 2014
A problematic thing about the Musa Almi [checkpoint] is that we’re in charge of the ambulances, too. If there’s somebody sick who’s leaving or entering the [occupied] territories, the ambulances have to stop at Musa Almi.
The ambulance arrives, [the driver] gives me his ID and the sick person’s ID, there’s coordination. I call up the bridge (The military headquarters at the Allenby Bridge crossing, which connects the West Bank and Jordan) and ask if there’s an ambulance on the Jordanian side, then two ambulances get there and the sick person is moved from one ambulance to the Jordanian one and goes off in the direction of Jordan.
So if everything was in order, the ambulance arrives and there’s coordination, and it passes through. But usually that’s not what happened. Usually the ambulances wait.
An ambulance arrives and [the driver] gives me [the patient’s] ID. I check, and this patient hasn’t been coordinated. I call up the bridge, to ask if there’s something new in the system, or if they know about something about this.
Nope – no coordination. So we say, “No coordination, you’ve got to wait.” Sometimes this happened when there were elderly people in the ambulance. Sometimes it took a long time. I had one case where someone waited there for hours.
Sometimes we’d be in the middle of work and doing other things there, not checking every ten minutes to see if the coordination had come through – so it could be that you’re in the middle of things and so you don’t see that half an hour ago the coordination came through and you can let the ambulance pass. When you’re at the bridge and the ambulance isn’t the only thing on your mind, it slips out of your head as you take care of other things you need to take care of and often you just forget you were supposed to do it.
Once or twice I saw an ambulance that got there, waited a long time, and at the end of the day turned around because it wasn’t coordinated. There were cases where the ambulance passed through in 20 minutes – but usually it took longer.
categories:
[ Checkpoints ]
Unit: Civil Administration
Area: Jericho and the Jordan valley
period: 2014
A problematic thing about the Musa Almi [checkpoint] is that we’re in charge of the ambulances, too. If there’s somebody sick who’s leaving or entering the [occupied] territories, the ambulances have to stop at Musa Almi.
The ambulance arrives, [the driver] gives me his ID and the sick person’s ID, there’s coordination. I call up the bridge (The military headquarters at the Allenby Bridge crossing, which connects the West Bank and Jordan) and ask if there’s an ambulance on the Jordanian side, then two ambulances get there and the sick person is moved from one ambulance to the Jordanian one and goes off in the direction of Jordan.
So if everything was in order, the ambulance arrives and there’s coordination, and it passes through. But usually that’s not what happened. Usually the ambulances wait.
An ambulance arrives and [the driver] gives me [the patient’s] ID. I check, and this patient hasn’t been coordinated. I call up the bridge, to ask if there’s something new in the system, or if they know about something about this.
Nope – no coordination. So we say, “No coordination, you’ve got to wait.” Sometimes this happened when there were elderly people in the ambulance. Sometimes it took a long time. I had one case where someone waited there for hours.
Sometimes we’d be in the middle of work and doing other things there, not checking every ten minutes to see if the coordination had come through – so it could be that you’re in the middle of things and so you don’t see that half an hour ago the coordination came through and you can let the ambulance pass. When you’re at the bridge and the ambulance isn’t the only thing on your mind, it slips out of your head as you take care of other things you need to take care of and often you just forget you were supposed to do it.
Once or twice I saw an ambulance that got there, waited a long time, and at the end of the day turned around because it wasn’t coordinated. There were cases where the ambulance passed through in 20 minutes – but usually it took longer.
categories:
[ Checkpoints ]
testimony catalog number: 132517
rank: Staff Sergeant
unit: Mechanized infantry
area: Deir al-Balah area
period: 2014
The rules of engagement are pretty identical: Anything inside [the Gaza Strip] is a threat, the area has to be ‘sterilized,’ empty of people – and if we don’t see someone waving a white flag, screaming “I give up” or something – then he is a threat and there is authorization to open fire. In the event that we arrest and restrain him, then one strips him to make sure there is no explosive device on him.
To get authorization to open fire, does he need to be armed, or with binoculars?
I think he just needs to be there.
When you say open fire, what does that mean?
Shooting to kill. This is combat in an urban area, we’re in a war zone. The saying was: ‘There’s no such thing there as a person who is uninvolved.’ In that situation, anyone there is involved.
Everything is dangerous; there were no special intelligence warnings such as some person, or some white vehicle arriving… No vehicle is supposed to be there – if there is one, we shoot at it.
Anything that’s not ‘sterile’ is suspect. There was an intelligence warning about animals. If a suspicious animal comes near, shoot it. In practice, we didn’t do that. We had arguments about whether or not to do it. But that was just a general instruction; in practice you learn to recognize the animals because they are the only ones wandering around.
During the period that you were there, did you see an armed Palestinian?
Nothing, I didn’t see a single living human being, except for the guys in my platoon and a few from the Armored Corps.
rank: Staff Sergeant
unit: Mechanized infantry
area: Deir al-Balah area
period: 2014
The rules of engagement are pretty identical: Anything inside [the Gaza Strip] is a threat, the area has to be ‘sterilized,’ empty of people – and if we don’t see someone waving a white flag, screaming “I give up” or something – then he is a threat and there is authorization to open fire. In the event that we arrest and restrain him, then one strips him to make sure there is no explosive device on him.
To get authorization to open fire, does he need to be armed, or with binoculars?
I think he just needs to be there.
When you say open fire, what does that mean?
Shooting to kill. This is combat in an urban area, we’re in a war zone. The saying was: ‘There’s no such thing there as a person who is uninvolved.’ In that situation, anyone there is involved.
Everything is dangerous; there were no special intelligence warnings such as some person, or some white vehicle arriving… No vehicle is supposed to be there – if there is one, we shoot at it.
Anything that’s not ‘sterile’ is suspect. There was an intelligence warning about animals. If a suspicious animal comes near, shoot it. In practice, we didn’t do that. We had arguments about whether or not to do it. But that was just a general instruction; in practice you learn to recognize the animals because they are the only ones wandering around.
During the period that you were there, did you see an armed Palestinian?
Nothing, I didn’t see a single living human being, except for the guys in my platoon and a few from the Armored Corps.
- This testimony appears under these categories: General, Rules of engagement
- This testimony can also be read in Hebrew
testimony catalog number: 291321
area: Gaza strip
period: 2014
You said there were cases in which an operational necessity trumped the risk of causing harm to civilians. Could you give me an example?
Say there’s a building that’s over two stories high, and you know for certain there’s a meeting between two heads of [enemy] cells in there, and you decide to take it down.
And this is when you know that there are additional civilians in there, or this is when you prefer not to check?
On occasion, you do know.
Can you give me a specific example?
I don’t remember much – I do remember there was this one house of five or six stories in Khirbet Khuza’a. I remember there was ‘hot’ intel data on a meeting between militants there. The head of the cell was there for sure, and a decision was made to ’knock on the building’s roof,’ (a practice in which a small missile is fired at the roof of a building as an advance warning that it will shortly be destroyed in an air strike) and then immediately after that drop a bomb on it.
What’s ‘immediately?’
Not enough time for everyone to leave. Somewhere between 30 seconds and one minute.
Did you see anyone leaving the house?
Nope, actually – no one. I remember that after the ‘roof knocking,’ nobody left the house. I don’t know if that means they were being held there by force, or I don’t know what. I didn’t follow up to see whether harm was really inflicted upon civilians there, whether innocent people got killed there.
While you’re getting approval for [striking] the target, do you have any tools to find out whether there are other people in the house?
You can find out.
Do you try?
Absolutely, yes. You use all the means at your disposal to ascertain the number of militants that are in there, how many people, how many ‘hot spots.’ These probes don’t always work – either you didn’t manage to collect all the data you wanted, or you did and it’s not the answer you wanted to find. In any case, you decide to [bomb].
If you have all the means at your disposal to make sure there are no people [in the buildings], how come all those people were killed anyway?
There’s no way we can know everything. We do everything we can to know. If some family doesn’t have a phone and there’s no verification, and despite that you went ahead and ’knocked on the roof’ and nobody came out after a few minutes – then the assumption is that there’s nobody in there.
Is there some possibility that they would decide not to leave despite a ‘knock on the roof?’
There’s nothing you can do about people who are willing to sacrifice themselves. I’m not trying to justify such behavior. But the way the IDF sees it, if, say, ‘roof knocking’ was executed [and people stayed in the building] then there’s no way we can know about it. We have no way of knowing if there are people in there who chose not to leave.
Verifying that there are no civilians in the building – is that a mandatory prerequisite for carrying out a strike?
It’s not mandatory. Because even if there are civilians sometimes – [for example, while targeting] the Shuja’iyya deputy battalion commander, [the strike] would be carried out if there weren’t too many civilians. When I say ‘too many’ I mean a double digit number.
This story, how atypical was it?
This was atypical due to the fact it was a multi-story building, five or six stories –because most of the houses that were seriously flattened were two, maybe three stories, tops. It was also atypical in the sense that there was information about the presence of innocent people in there. There was data about a certain number [of civilians] and it withstood the equation, apparently – and there was simply enough of an accumulation of intelligence and verified data about the presence of heads of cells in there, that they decided that the bombing was justified.
area: Gaza strip
period: 2014
You said there were cases in which an operational necessity trumped the risk of causing harm to civilians. Could you give me an example?
Say there’s a building that’s over two stories high, and you know for certain there’s a meeting between two heads of [enemy] cells in there, and you decide to take it down.
And this is when you know that there are additional civilians in there, or this is when you prefer not to check?
On occasion, you do know.
Can you give me a specific example?
I don’t remember much – I do remember there was this one house of five or six stories in Khirbet Khuza’a. I remember there was ‘hot’ intel data on a meeting between militants there. The head of the cell was there for sure, and a decision was made to ’knock on the building’s roof,’ (a practice in which a small missile is fired at the roof of a building as an advance warning that it will shortly be destroyed in an air strike) and then immediately after that drop a bomb on it.
What’s ‘immediately?’
Not enough time for everyone to leave. Somewhere between 30 seconds and one minute.
Did you see anyone leaving the house?
Nope, actually – no one. I remember that after the ‘roof knocking,’ nobody left the house. I don’t know if that means they were being held there by force, or I don’t know what. I didn’t follow up to see whether harm was really inflicted upon civilians there, whether innocent people got killed there.
While you’re getting approval for [striking] the target, do you have any tools to find out whether there are other people in the house?
You can find out.
Do you try?
Absolutely, yes. You use all the means at your disposal to ascertain the number of militants that are in there, how many people, how many ‘hot spots.’ These probes don’t always work – either you didn’t manage to collect all the data you wanted, or you did and it’s not the answer you wanted to find. In any case, you decide to [bomb].
If you have all the means at your disposal to make sure there are no people [in the buildings], how come all those people were killed anyway?
There’s no way we can know everything. We do everything we can to know. If some family doesn’t have a phone and there’s no verification, and despite that you went ahead and ’knocked on the roof’ and nobody came out after a few minutes – then the assumption is that there’s nobody in there.
Is there some possibility that they would decide not to leave despite a ‘knock on the roof?’
There’s nothing you can do about people who are willing to sacrifice themselves. I’m not trying to justify such behavior. But the way the IDF sees it, if, say, ‘roof knocking’ was executed [and people stayed in the building] then there’s no way we can know about it. We have no way of knowing if there are people in there who chose not to leave.
Verifying that there are no civilians in the building – is that a mandatory prerequisite for carrying out a strike?
It’s not mandatory. Because even if there are civilians sometimes – [for example, while targeting] the Shuja’iyya deputy battalion commander, [the strike] would be carried out if there weren’t too many civilians. When I say ‘too many’ I mean a double digit number.
This story, how atypical was it?
This was atypical due to the fact it was a multi-story building, five or six stories –because most of the houses that were seriously flattened were two, maybe three stories, tops. It was also atypical in the sense that there was information about the presence of innocent people in there. There was data about a certain number [of civilians] and it withstood the equation, apparently – and there was simply enough of an accumulation of intelligence and verified data about the presence of heads of cells in there, that they decided that the bombing was justified.
- This testimony appears under these categories: Assassinations, Deaths, House demolitions/razing, Rules of engagement
- This testimony can also be read in Hebrew
testimony catalog number: 404284
rank: Staff Sergeant
unit: Armored Corps
period: 2014
On the day the fellow from our company was killed, the commanders came up to us and told us what happened. Then they decided to fire an ‘honor barrage’ and fire three shells. They said, “This is in memory of ****.” That felt very out of line to me, very problematic.
A barrage of what?
A barrage of shells. They fired the way it’s done in funerals, but with shellfire and at houses. Not into the air. They just chose [a house] – the tank commander said, “Just pick the farthest one, so it does the most damage.” Revenge of sorts. So we fired at one of the houses. Really you just see a block of houses in front of you, so the distance doesn’t really matter.
Three shells on the same spot?
Yeah. I don’t remember exactly what time it was, but it was close to sunset.
rank: Staff Sergeant
unit: Armored Corps
period: 2014
On the day the fellow from our company was killed, the commanders came up to us and told us what happened. Then they decided to fire an ‘honor barrage’ and fire three shells. They said, “This is in memory of ****.” That felt very out of line to me, very problematic.
A barrage of what?
A barrage of shells. They fired the way it’s done in funerals, but with shellfire and at houses. Not into the air. They just chose [a house] – the tank commander said, “Just pick the farthest one, so it does the most damage.” Revenge of sorts. So we fired at one of the houses. Really you just see a block of houses in front of you, so the distance doesn’t really matter.
Three shells on the same spot?
Yeah. I don’t remember exactly what time it was, but it was close to sunset.
- This testimony appears under these categories: Rules of engagement
- This testimony can also be read in Hebrew
