We were a crew in Gaza early in 2003. Once, we were summoned to demolish a home of two terror team leaders. Two fourteen-year olds. This was one of the most unjustified things I had ever done. The homes were built of blocks with a metal sheet for a roof. We brought explosives to the structure. When we saw the shanty, we took back most of the explosives, we had overpacked. Then we destroyed the place. We let the family take out their belongings.

How much time do they have to evacuate?That varies. There were instances when they had ten minutes, I've seen cases where they had a lot of time, even enough to dismantle doors and transport them elsewhere. The last house the demolition of which I took part in was at Zeitoun some hours before the APC was blown up (the interviewee is referring to an event in summer 2004 when an APC hit an explosive charge in the Gaza Strip).

Was it the home of a terrorist?When we got there, we had an unverified warning about the fellow living there. After investigation we learned the guy plans suicide bombings. A force of Givati engineers took down the house. There was the father's cab at this place, but there was no way to get it out. D-9 bulldozers razed all the paving outside and created huge earth mounds. The army wanted to let him get the cab out but there was no way to do that. They were allowed to take out all their important documents: birth certificates, document folders. … It can never be precisely calculated. But I can tell you that my unit, in most cases where it took down houses, the action was carried out in the presence of an engineer and the house layout. There's a book that every engineering officer goes over, with the calculation of explosives related to the state of warfare. When you lay 150% of the explosives you would normally use because of Palestinian construction, you have no way of knowing what is really going to happen. At Zeitoun these were standard-built structures of concrete and there's a general formula for doing that. The forces are already skilled. But there are cases where you have no idea what it is going to be like. At times, explosives labs were destroyed and the entire building folded. We aim for localized damage. The army sits and thinks about how to take down one apartment inside a whole building. If you are going to demolish a person's apartment, then demolish his apartment. What really got me. . . either you call it warfare and carry out proper warfare and get down with it, or you avoid warfare because no matter how surgical you try to be, people are going to die all around. . .and then you have to ask what is more humane, having been terribly surgical and nice for a long time but killed lots of people, or if you came and killed 200 in one blow and the warfare was done with? And that's something else that bothered me terribly about warfare: you feel that no one really has any idea where he's going. The instructions keep changing. It's this way, then it's that way, once you are allowed to apply some force, another time you go for it full force.

Arbitrarily?You feel like this is an absurd situation. In my third entry to Nablus, everyone knew we were not going to find a thing. An Arabic-speaking soldier came with us and questioned everyone. We went from house to house. Searches were carried out, but everyone knew there was no combat value to what we were doing; that there was nothing in the house. It reached the absurd point where I passed through the same holes I had bored in the walls a year-and-a-half earlier. They realized there was no point in closing up the holes again because the army would return anyway.