If there’s a Molotov Cocktail from an area near villages, if it’s Madama or Burin, it’s already protocol to impose a closure on the village for 24 hours. If it happens in Hawara, the DCO (District Coordination Office) gives the instruction: Close down all the shops in Hawara. It’s collective punishment. Someone throws a Molotov Cocktail, it’s not even clear if he’s from the village. It’s Nablus’s commercial center. All the stores and restaurants are there, that’s where people make their money, their living. It usually happens at night. I don’t know if they would adopt the same measures if it was in the morning, but that’s the protocol. It’s something like 100 stores. It’s the most effective place to punish. It’s a central road: Falafel, pizza, meat shops.

On Route 60? Yes. If there’s a Molotov Cocktail at five in the evening, then they’ve lost four or five work hours and they can’t open any later. Until the next morning it’s agreed that they won’t open. Lately they’ve started adding DCO representatives to these missions so they can talk in Arabic, as if trying to show the IDF’s good side.

How often does this happen? Once a month on average in Hawara. They generally go into stores and scream at people, “Close your store. You have a few minutes.” That’s it. My commander came back from such an operation. He explained the orders, and while he was talking the battalion commander interrupted him, threw a stun grenade into the store. People inside the store started coughing and running outside; they were running outside hysterically… They [the soldiers] thought it was really funny that everyone ran out like mice. They did that at almost every store. When it was still the Nahal [brigade], they threw [tear] gas on the street itself. Anyone who got a glimpse of them understood the message. There was also talk about how to do it, “go from store to store?” So the battalion commander said to him [the officer that asked], “don’t worry, there’s a very simple method: You throw stun grenades or gas and they get the message.” It turned out that he fired 60 stun grenades. That was an insane amount of crowd control techniques for no logical reason. In the end the report also detailed all the crowd control texhniques they used. I remember 67-69 stun grenades. Part of the DCO officer’s description was “What a laugh, it was a tiny store and they had nowhere to run. People started quivering there and it was really funny.