… What broke everything [was] – the brigade commander is standing in front of us in a briefing, [saying] that we’re in a ‘hudna’ (ceasefire), a sensitive situation, he’s talking about it, and then a minute later he briefs us: “Any child that you see with a stone, you can shoot.” Like, kill him. A stone!

Who was giving the briefing? The battalion commander or the brigade commander, I don’t remember, it was a briefing like this: “Now the situation here is sensitive, and a stone is a lethal weapon, you know what it is. I’ve seen someone injured by a stone.” I think that our battalion commander, of the… He saw that the regional brigade commander was also there.

*** gave an order that you can shoot at a child throwing astone? Yes, because it’s a murder weapon, because they throw it on the road. That was during the ‘hudna’...

Wasn’t there an outcry against it? No. I told you, I was almost totally outside it, as far as I was concerned, in my thinking. And what annoyed me the most was that the guys on the team had reached a point that the only thing they were interested in [was] that for the briefing, they told them that because it’s the brigade commander, they have to put on boots, army boots. And they argued about it for hours, and one of them went and yelled at the company commander, they yelled at each other for half an hour after that briefing. And no one confronted him… And obviously I wanted to ask, but I felt such despair from all these close-minded people, and I knew that every time I asked there was opposition against me, the several people who [said], “Come on, again with the questions and again with this, we want to play soccer.” Or, “Shut up with your questions.” It always followed me, I had the group that was always in the opposition, and I knew I wouldn’t get an answer, as usual. It was, to me, over the limit, it was really too much. The people said, the soldiers said, as a joke, “Let’s just shoot someone to end this stinking ‘hudna’, and we’ll stop with the ambushes and go back to making arrests.” And here, this guy from the highest ranking command, who’s apparently also fed up, comes and wants something to happen.

Do you remember who the battalion commander was then? Yes, ***.