What kind of ambushes did you do? There’s a cliff above the road, from where they (Palestinians) would throw stones at the Jewish cars passing below. They would wait for them up there. So we’d sit in some corner and wait for those kids to come around, and the fear was of Molotov cocktails. Throwing one at a Jewish car would mean death. That was our fear. In the end, it usually only amounted to stone-throwing, but that’s dangerous too. One of those rocks falling on a car could kill someone.

If you see a kid or someone else with a rock on the cliff – what’s the procedure? You’re pretty helpless.

So what would you do, catch the kid? If you’re lucky. You’re helpless, if he’s right on the other side of the cliff, you’re on foot patrol, what do you do? Chase him? He’ll disappear, you’ll never catch him.

So were there rules of engagement? You have, you’re walking around with crowd dispersal grenade launchers, all kinds of stuff, stun grenades and rubbish like that, and it doesn’t help. You yell at him and he gets scared, the kids get scared.

Would he simply run off? Usually he would, if he saw us. That was the point, to show presence. These weren’t terrorists. There are few terrorists anyway, after Operation Defensive Shield. How many terrorists are there, nowadays, in the West Bank? There are mostly kids.

What was the point of the ambushes? The point was to catch those guys and take them into custody. The unpleasant part was, you catch them, what do you do with them? Some guys, we caught and shackled and brought to the base. Like in a lot of army operations, there’s all that crap, how people are treated. And you see, on the basic level, we’re a racist and disgusting society. All of humanity is evil, and where there’s an army, that evil really shows.

In what way? You bring someone who’s shackled and blindfolded into an army base, and the soldiers in back start swearing at him, making fun of him, I don’t know if he even understands what they’re saying. It’s like the champagne that the company commander bought for the soldier who shot a kid in the knee. It’s a kind of blood-thirstiness. It goes for us and for them. The whole region… There was swearing. A lot of nerves, a lot of tension. Guys came back from arrests or other actions, a lot of nerves, a lot of baggage they brought with them from home. Guys from a settlement whose friends had been killed a day earlier. The whole atmosphere was during Operation Cast Lead, so there were several characteristics: all the commanders were frustrated because they weren’t there (in Gaza), so that contributed to the overall frustration; also, the fact that we were there for 28 days straight, during all of Cast Lead, that also frustrated all the soldiers; some of the guys had friends killed in the operation, so that also played a part. There was a lot of tension, a whole lot of tension.