There was one vessel that was "making trouble" all night, going in and out of the closed area (the witness previously described a part of Gaza's waters that Palestinian vessels are forbidden from entering), totally acting like a "cheeky" fisherman, that's how we called it, but he looked like a fisherman, he gathered in a net. There was a commander on patrol that dealt with him all night. I heard the frustration building up all night. That ties in with how it's hard to perform that assignment, you don't have the tools to keep the area clean. If the vessel comes back, there's nothing you can do about it. Sometimes, it can happen dozens of times a night. I felt that the commander was getting more and more frustrated over it. Towards morning, the vessel entered the closed area and the commander decided that it was suspected of hostile terrorist activity. That sounded like a completely made up evaluation to me, and that he wanted to take some drastic measure to end it.

The Dabur commander decided that it was suspected of terrorist activity?Yes. You can't argue with him. That's a tool that the Dabur commander has, it's a job with a lot of responsibility and your decisions are not questioned. I saw how the night went, I saw it all and heard the reports over the radio. As far as I was concerned, that vessel wasn't suspected of terrorist activity. We got on the radio with the commander and cautiously said to him, "Listen, I don't know what you're basing your call to make an arrest for suspected terrorist activity. We can't see what makes it suspicious…". He said that its behavior throughout the night showed that it was suspect. As soon as it was called a suspect, it's easier to arrest people there, and the whole incident is filed as a terrorist incident. There's a contradiction here, because if he's suspected of terrorist activity, you're not supposed to get close to him, [because] he might explode. It's all black holes that show how incoherent the procedures are, in the end. We got the order to arrest the vessel, and then the arrest began. They (the fishermen) weren't obedient at first and tried to get away. One of the commanders shot at the body of the vessel and got between it and the anchoring platform in Gaza. The trawler stopped, the vessel stopped. We took three people on board. They didn't give us (ID) numbers, no ID cards, and meanwhile the soldiers were putting the pressure on. None of the crew knew Arabic, and one soldier said to the commander, "Come on, I'll slap them and get the details from them." The commander asked him, "What do you mean, is that something you usually do?" Because there's no procedure that includes that action, it's forbidden. He told him it was unacceptable, but he was under pressure to get their details, and the soldiers kept pressuring him to let them give them a little slap, "I'm here a lot, I know how it works", stuff like that, which shows that unreported force is used. At a certain point, we told the shore that we couldn't get details without using force and that we weren't about to use force. They answered that the order was to get the details. We took one of the fishermen, the one who spoke Hebrew, somewhere else, and told him we had a problem and that if they wanted to get off lightly, we need him to give us those details. He agreed and they gave us the details. But not before one of the fishermen peed in his pants. He didn't speak Hebrew, he started mumbling in Arabic, and the one who spoke Hebrew said he needed to pee. So the soldiers on deck stood and joked that he just wanted to have his hands untied. The fisherman is saying, "No, he has to pee, he has to pee", and it's scary untying a guy. We passed on their details, and of course they weren't wanted. We let them go back to their vessel after four hours.