It’s mostly about punishment. I hate that the most, “They did it to us, so we’ll do it to them.” Do you know what a naval blockade means for them? There’s no food for a few days. For example, it could be there was an attack in Netanya, so they impose a naval blockade for four days on the entire strip. No seagoing vessel can leave, a Dabur patrol boat is stationed at the entrance to the port, if they try to go out, within a second they shoot at the bow, and they’ll even deploy attack helicopters to scare them. We had a lot of operations with attack helicopters— they don’t shoot too much because they prefer to let us deal with it, but they’re there to scare people, they circle over their heads. All of a sudden a Cobra is right over your head, it passes low, it stirs up the wind and throws everything around. There were a lot of incidents like that. The attack helicopters worked with us a lot.
And how common was the blockade?
Very common. More common than a special isolation, which was relatively rare. I wouldn’t say more than once a month, but it could be that it’d happen three times in one month, and then three months of nothing. It depends.
The blockade is for a day, two days, three days, four, or more than that?
I can’t remember anything longer than four days. If it was longer than that, they’d die there, and I believe the IDF understands that. Seventy percent live on fishing—they have no choice. For them it means not eating. There are whole families who don’t eat for a few days because of the blockade. They eat bread and water. Like in the Holocaust.