There’s an arrest that I remember well. We went out at around 1 AM from Beit El through the gate. A short navigation, entry into the [Jalazone] refugee camp. Overall it’s quiet, nothing too much. We arrive at the house, it’s a very small house, knock on the door, three loud knocks, ‘Iftah al-bab’ (Arabic for “open the door”) and like wait for a response. There is no response, we do it again: ‘Iftah al-bab.’ It doesn’t work. We start trying to break in, meaning tearing the door off its hinges.

How do you do that?There’s a break-in kit. You just bang on the hinges of the door hard enough until they break. We were halfway to breaking the door until... It makes a lot of noise in the neighborhood, too, right? The company commander starts getting scared that we’ll be discovered and lynched or something so we do it very fast. Halfway there they had already opened the door for us there. A thirty-something-year-old man comes out. The company commander tells this one fireteam cell, “Do a search on him,” they take him off to the side, throw him out, tell him ‘Rukh’ (Arabic for “go”), and move him aside.

There’s a person who’s standing at the door and it’s not the person you’re looking for?No [it’s not].

And then what happens?The company commander decides we’re entering the house. The fireteam cell searches him in the meantime, ties him up and puts handcuffs and a blindfold on him. Broadly the directive was  to arrest everyone we see in this house because everyone is from the same family until it becomes clear which one of them is the teen we’re looking for.

So what does arrest everyone mean?Just to put them in handcuffs and a blindfold so they won’t be able to go wild.

So who was home?There was a woman in the house, who was very adamant about us not going into some room. She was a mother. She was like 50, forty-something.

And you handcuffed her too?No, not her. There was a female border police officer there with us. She went in and took care [of it]. Broadly we didn’t really understand what she wants, she just insisted we don’t go into some room. We started getting nervous because we thought there was something in that room, we didn’t understand, she was shouting in Arabic, and it was kind of blood-curdling screams, but generally she was yelling in Arabic don’t enter the room, don’t enter the room. Then we got that two of her daughters are there, right? That like one of them was in the shower.

How did you understand that?Later from the Shin Bet guy. It’s just that because she was a woman, we didn’t feel comfortable disobeying her, but the company commander started pushing her to the side until the Shin Bet guy said, stop, stop, like in a second you’re going to enter a room with a girl who’s having a shower. It was a pretty horrifying scene. She was just begging. She sat and begged us not to go into the room, and we didn’t understand why.

And did you enter the room in the end?No, in the end we didn’t enter the room. And then I remember we got to another room that had, where the guy was sleeping.

The guy you were looking for?Yes. Sleeping, just sleeping in bed. It was like... At first it was “Get up, get up.” He obviously didn’t understand what we want from him because he didn’t know someone was coming to arrest him so there was a little slapping like, “Get up, get up.” We get him down to the floor, the Shin Bet guy takes a look for a second, asks him a few questions. He didn’t resist too much. I mean he had just woken up. We picked him up off the floor and dragged him out of the house. There was no resistance. He was in shock, he didn’t understand what was going on around him at all.

How old was he?Sixteen, something like that. We dragged him out of the house. Then, when he realized what was happening, then he started resisting a tiny bit. I remember he was held by both hands so he doesn’t start going wild. It was like a lot of yelling ‘Uskut’ ("shut up" in Arabic) at him. I remember that the deputy battalion commander came and started screaming Arabic swear words at him there. I didn’t understand most of them, it was violent. In the end we lowered him to the floor, handcuffed him.

All of this is happening inside the house?No, that was outside already, it’s in the street. This is when the company commander started getting nervous that we’d be discovered because we were making a lot of noise. Running, running, running, this person is resisting. Ultimately the situation is that soldiers are lifting him, he resists at the same time, kicking and that. We lift him, run, throwing him in the Shin Bet guys’ car and starting to flee from the village. Meanwhile a kind of waking up starts in the village. It’s close to 4-5 [AM], people hear. Some stone throwing started behind us. I didn’t understand exactly where they’d come out of. We didn’t have riot control gear handy or things like that, so we just fired a few live bullets in the air and one was towards some roof of a house, something like that, in order to show that we are bringing our shots closer to them. After that we started shooting [tear] gas too. This whole incident was basically over. Meaning they dispersed, it wasn’t something too big, this riot.