Did you witness looting? At the checkpoints, all the time. At some point, Shimshon battalion decided that it would be better, instead of looting cars, just to tell the driver to go back to the village: “Come back with four bottles of Coke, and then we’ll let you through”.
They would say that directly? Yes. It wasn’t looting, it was on a different level.
Were there other things as well? From car, soldiers love to take the (drivers’) prayer beads. When I searched cars, I would always ask the people to take their Quran, their mobile phone and their cigarettes out with them – because cigarettes are another thing that soldiers love to take.
Did you ever see soldiers taking cigarettes? If I saw with it my own eyes, it would be returned that minute. Because people don’t want to get into trouble. Officers can look the other way, but not when someone comes to them and says that a soldier has taken cigarettes. And because I have nothing to do with them, there’s no reason for me not to do it. It was like: “Either you put that back or I’ll tell your commanding officer…” But in the end, someone always takes something. In operational activity, too, I didn’t see it myself, but there were two soldiers who took money out of homes.
How do you know? They talked about it with their friends at the army post. Or, more than once, I was there when a company commander or platoon commander – the rank doesn’t matter – would gather everyone together and tell them that the family was claiming, “You took money. I want to believe that none of you did such a thing” and that closed the subject.
That’s all? Because he ‘wanted to believe’? That’s a good enough reason… So yes, it happens all the time.
And vandalism? Define vandalism. If I want to hide a sniffer (a case filled with explosives used for training army dogs) and I take – by the way, we’re amazing car mechanics, because we know how to take a whole car apart – there’s that plastic part of the door, and if you take out the inner part, there’s that metal hole, so you put the sniffer inside, it’s a great place to hide it because there’s a pretty large space. You close it with that ugly upholstery. I did that and left it open, is that considered vandalism? And if I tore it, is that vandalism? If it is, then I’ve seen vandalism. I didn’t do it myself, but soldiers vandalize property all the time.
Were you ever present at searches where something got broken? Sure. First of all, a dog can be a very clumsy animal. So say you’ve got shelves loaded with porcelain dishes. The dog has to search the whole house. You can order it to sit, wait, or go and look. Some girls will have the dog jump and it might break the porcelain.
What gets broken? Everything. You say “oops”, push it aside so that the dog won’t get hurt accidentally, and continue. You rip up a mattress in order to hide something for the dog, and turn it over.