Democracy Now! speaks with two former Israeli soldiers who are members of Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation group of Israeli army veterans. ... DNow! April 10, https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/10/breaking_the_silence_israel . . . NADAV WEIMAN: Yeah. So, I served between 2005 to 2008 in a special forces unit. ...mainly we did sniping operations.
You know, when you want to do sniping operations inside Palestinian cities or villages, you don’t have a hill or a forest to take cover in. So, what we used to do is something that is called “straw widow.” It’s a codename in the IDF of taking a private Palestinian family’s house and turning it into a military post. You choose a house that looks best for you. Maybe it’s tall. Maybe it has big windows. Then you call the Shin Bet. You make sure that every one of the family members are innocent, are not connected to terror. And then, in the middle of the night, you come. You sneak into the neighborhood. You break the door down. You grab everybody from their beds, because then they cannot really resist you, put them in one room, and then use one of the rooms — the parents’ bedroom, for example — as our sniping post. We put our sniping rifles. And after that, if one of the family members wants to eat, they want to drink, they want to take medicine, they want to pray, they need authorization from us, because it’s our house. It’s not their house anymore. And then you shoot from their houses. The minute you do that, the armed convoy come, and you go back to the base. But that’s the West Bank. In Gaza, when I did the same thing, “straw widows” in Gaza, in 2008, you don’t infiltrate. You don’t do it quietly in the middle of the night. When we approached the houses, the fenced-off houses of Gaza, after cutting the fence and walking over there, a tank came and rammed one of the walls of the house and knocked it down, because they told us that every house in Gaza is booby-trapped. And then, when we got inside the house, we took all of the men, from 16 years old until 80 years old, and we put them on a truck, drove them back to Israel for interrogation. And then, when we put our sniping rifles on the rooftop, we saw there was lots of new greenhouses that we didn’t see in the aerial photograph. So we called the D9 bulldozer, that smashed everything down so we will have a clean line of fire. And I think that’s the difference between the ongoing occupation with settlements and checkpoints in the West Bank and the occupation by siege that we have in Gaza since 2007 and the level of brutality or firepower that we use over there. . . . -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#29857): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/29857 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/105451484/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
