I stopped a car coming out of Hebron. It crossed a dirt barrier, I stopped it. There were two Israeli citizens inside, Arab Israelis from Jerusalem, I think, I don’t know what, who aren't allowed to be there. I think it was the second time I caught the same people. Okay, I took their ID cards, which is also wrong. It’s against regulations. The practice was usually to take ID cards of Palestinians. So first I took the ID cards, called the police and said: “I’ve got these two Israeli citizens here, Arabs, they’ve come out of Hebron and look a bit suspicious, come and do something, give them a report on their car, the car is probably not okay, right? Just do something.” What did the police say? I’m more or less quoting them: “Hold them for two-three hours and then let them go.” So I took their ID cards and said: “Guys, stay here, I’ll be back in two hours, I’ll give you your IDs then and I’ll let you go.” I left. When I got back two hours later, the car was there, but the people weren’t. In the end that turned into a mess too, because I took the IDs, no, the deputy company commander took the IDs and gave them to his radioman to return to the Palestinians. They gave the IDs to other people that he’d detained. Yes. What was the procedure? You see a Palestinian driving on the road, not an Arab Israeli, a Palestinian, procedure was to stop him, check his vehicle. If the Palestinian had no permits, you took his ID. You had to give him some kind of substitute paper, which was also a summons to report to the DCO at Hebron to get his ID back, something like that, and you carried on. So at the end of an eight-hour shift on patrol, I’d end up at the Hebron DCO with 20, 30, 40 Palestinian IDs on my hands. Every shift. Until it created a problem with the DCO, yeah, because all sorts of Palestinians are running around without IDs and they don’t show up, either. Sometimes they do, but mostly not. So, anyway, those two Arab Israelis didn’t get their IDs, they called B’Tselem or something. TV Channel 2 reporters came to the sentry post of the brigade HQ. The brigade commander calls on the phone: “Where are the IDs?” And so on.

How did it end? How did it end? We had no IDs to give them because the company commander had supposedly done that, but he gave them to the wrong people. In the end, I don’t know. As far as I was concerned, or my company? Nothing happened. Was I reprimanded for that? No. Actually, maybe I was, the company commander said: “You were wrong to do that.” I asked: “What do you mean? The deputy commander took the IDs from me to give them back, what do you want from me?” And nothing happened to the deputy commander. He’s actually a company commander now. He’s the same violent deputy commander from the story of the stolen cars in Yatta (interviewee refers to a case described earlier in the interview, in which the same officer beat up a Palestinian).