A drill in one of the nearby villages was planned – a house-takeover drill. You don't harass, you don't knock on the door and get people out, but you grab all the corners, you target the house. The rationale is ‘tactical deception,’ to show that there's activity. The company commander gave us a lecture about it: Taking over a mock house. Just some family's house in the village, villages where no arrests had been made in years.

The idea was to arrest the person? No, just to drill a closure.

Were there operational walking drills? Yes. In these villages too. Mainly Azimut and Deir al-Hatab. We were in Deir al-Hatab and we had to conduct a patrol on foot. It's a village you know is a quiet village, there's nothing special there, but we did operational walking anyway, and whenever we stopped each one of us covered some direction, and then we run into some passersby and they disperse, and someone opens the door and then closes it, scared.

How do you define such activity? A routine foot patrol. Completely routine. It's done a lot. It might have been during a village navigation drill, or to find some point in the village. That happens routinely.