Could you give me an estimate? Between one vehicle per minute to one vehicle per ten minutes. It’s not wild, it’s a village in the morning. We stop the cars, and we ourselves don’t know anything, so obviously we can’t answer any questions, and we don’t know a single word [of Arabic] so we can’t communicate [with the Palestinians]. And the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) guy, for his part, is of course not communicating with us at all. We can’t hear what he’s saying to [the Palestinians]. We simply bring him people. At a certain point we brought him this guy, aged 28, maybe 30. Then we heard the Shin Bet guy raise his voice in Arabic, and then the Shin Bet guy comes over to us and tells us, “Bind this guy, blindfold him, tie up his hands and put him in your jeep. Dismantle your checkpoint, we’re out of here.” No room for questions – he doesn’t explain to us why he’s doing it, or whether the person is a suspect, or has been arrested, or where we’re taking him – he doesn’t tell us anything. We dismantle the checkpoint and drive with [the Shin Bet officer]. He leads the way and we follow, and we’ve got the detainee with us. We drive, drive, drive, for over 20 minutes, in the direction of nowhere. Whoever’s been to [the West Bank region of] Samaria knows – it’s just barren hills there, with nothing on them. And after driving for a pretty long time he stops, tells us “Get him out of the vehicle, release him,” and we drive away. So we took this guy out – and of course he’s got no idea where he is. We release him, remove his blindfold, release the cable tie from his hands, get back in the car and drive off. And at that moment it started to rain. It’s damn cold over there, in Samaria, and he’s got his coat but no umbrella, no shelter – and that’s where the story ended, as far as we were concerned. We left a person tossed on some random hill.

When you let him out, did the Shin Bet guy interrogate him? Not at all, not at all.

How long did he question him in the field? Just a few minutes – and we had no way of knowing, really. I just remember that there was yelling going on. And you’re just saying to yourself, ‘What clout that Shin Bet guy has, he can simply make a person vanish.

How often did the Shin Bet carry out these missions with you? Pretty often, in that sector. A lot.