There were many situations when we would see people from Bat Ayin climbing up in the direction of Khirbet Safa, and you see they're settlers. They arrive from the direction of Bat Ayin with weapons. Many confrontations, much stone throwing.

They come from the settlement and enter the [Palestinian] village? Yes.

You're describing a pattern. Routinely every Saturday.

I want to understand the general pattern. What happened? There were things we saw through the cameras, there were things reported from the area. [It's] provoking the Palestinians. Not every Saturday would they take rifles to shoot them in the head, but every Saturday there was a confrontation. Say, steal a sheep, kill a sheep, throw stones on the herd, shouting at people or shepherds.

The Palestinians would arrive there for farming or herding purposes? Also, and also to provoke a bit. Both sides searched for a confrontation.

And what's the reaction to that? When these were small matters, screaming or throwing a few rocks and stuff, it would end with border police or a patrol was alerted.

And when the IDF or police arrive, what do they do? They distance the Palestinians and the settlers as well. These are things that would end most of the times without violence, these were things that would really [happen] just in order to provoke and irritate. But there were really times when I saw with my own eyes people climbing with weapons in the direction of Khirbet Safa, people from Bat Ayin, who you see are settlers. In such a case I would report it.

To whom? To my officer. And I don't remember to tell you how these things ended and how they were handled. There were [cases of] shooting but nobody was wounded.

Settlers shot? Yes.

Do you remember who they shot at? Khirbet Safa, at Palestinians.

Do you remember if the weapons were rifles or guns? M16 rifles.

In terms of the army, was some force stationed in the area of conflict in time? At some point, yes. There was already always a patrol sitting there to prevent it.

Were the settlers masked? No.

And did you identify faces? I imagine we did.

Did anybody ever ask you for these photographs in order to know who they were? Not from me, it's really not at my level. But we had many Shin Bet Security Service [personnel] with us and stuff like that.

Is it theoretically possible, does the system record? Sure. It saves recordings for a week or something like that, and then it's deleted. That is to say that you have to request it within a week.

Oftentimes in cases of settler violence, identification and actions against suspected settlers are very poor. Oftentimes the reason [that suspects aren’t arrested] is what’s known as 'unknown criminal.' I'm trying to understand what efforts are made by the system to find out who the criminal is. You can [identify them] very easily. It [the surveillance system] works in the same way, if they identified the terrorist (that invaded Bat Ayin and murdered Shlomo Nativ in April 2009) at exactly the same place, they identified his face and could arrest him, so obviously they can also identify the settlers.