I was busy with other things than worrying about explosives being sent into the State of Israel. I was more worried about how I was supposed to deal with the fact that no one had prepared me for working with a population of different age groups – the elderly, children, you name it. That was my toughest challenge. How to relate to them, how to treat them at checkpoints. I remember my first checkpoint as a combatant. I went there as a combatant, not as an Oketz [dog] operator. I was still in training and an alert came in about an Arab woman screaming that she was going to blow herself up or something. They asked whether anyone was prepared to volunteer to jump her, so I and *** from my team grabbed the opportunity to feel that we were a bit useful, and we jumped her. We made go flat on the pavement. She was really really big, and she was really fighting back, too. It was hard. You don’t stop to think that she might really have explosives on her, you just get a chance to do something so you did it. And then she had to be inspected. We went into a room with her – myself, a [female] combatant called ***, and the military policewoman. She conducted the body search while we stood there, the whole time, watching. What I remember most is the moment when she finished searching the woman. She simply took a whole container of dishwashing soap and, right in front of the Arab woman, poured a huge amount of it over her hands right and said, “Yuck, yuck, I can’t believe I touched her, she’s so gross”, right in front of that woman. Terrorist or no terrorist, I don’t know what she was, but she had nothing on her, and she (the military policewoman) just poured loads of soaps on herself in a very demonstrative way.

Do you remember what the body search looked like? It was a light search. She wasn’t stripped down naked or anything. She (the military policewoman) kept making faces as if she was really disgusted to touch her (the Palestinian woman).