One should start out by saying that leaflets did get scattered and military intelligence did say that [the Palestinians] knew [the IDF] was about to enter Shuja’iyya – and then updates started coming in from the battle in Shuja’iyya. And then what happened is that a very senior officer from the army strike coordination center comes in running and says, “Listen up, the brigade commander was killed and a soldier was kidnapped, it’s a mess, we need to help them.” So then the entire air force drops whatever it was doing at the moment and starts dealing with this thing, first priority. One of the most senior officials in the IDF, he just marked off houses on an aerial photo of Shuja’iyya, to be taken down. He simply looked at the map and saw commanding points and commanding houses and [picked targets] in a way that was in some sense sort of random – so that there would be no way that – if you’re a Hamas militant, there would be no way that there wasn’t some house that just got taken down near you right now. It’s not like in every building that was struck in Shuja’iyya there was some Hamas militant or somebody firing at our forces.

So why was it attacked? In order to keep their heads down and allow our forces to get out of there, to use firepower – that’s how the military works.

I’m trying to understand: it was random, or as part of a target list prepared in advance? It wasn’t prepared in advance at all. In the inquiry later on it was described as a mistake.