Every Saturday we’re on standby of sorts, knowing that the settlers leave for the central route, to the junction that joins the two neighborhoods (the Jewish and the Palestinian), and look for a fight. There’s always trouble there, at that junction. I was at the post, we heard there was a brawl, so we immediately rushed over there. Tons of anarchists with cameras, tons of human rights activists with cameras, a few settler kids who started fighting with a few Palestinians [children]. Really little kids. Think about how a fight in school between kids who in the worst case would be sent to the principal’s office, [in this case] the commander of the area is called up to separate them [from one another]. That’s how it is in Hebron.

How old are the kids roughly? A 12-year-old kid, something like that, 13. And because the police are supposed to handle the Jewish population, but by the time they arrive it takes a really long time, we simply came and took the [Palestinian] kid. In short, we pushed him away from there, and then we simply put him on our shoulders – he didn’t agree to come – [and carried] him up toward the post.

You arrested him? Yes, we took him away. I didn’t even have time to handcuff him. We simply picked him up and started walking. And then some human rights activist looks at me like ‘look at what you’re doing to the kid.’ That’s something that still stays with me.

So what do you actually do with such a kid? You take him to the post, he stays at the post until you hand him over to the police or something like that, and that’s it, I don’t know what is done, he continues the process.

At the police [station]? Yes.

And where is he held while he’s in the post? They would put him in the operations room, a side room. In this specific case we may not have even brought him to the post. They simply told us to release him because it was already on camera and looked bad.

So you released him? Yes, I think so.

So why did you arrest him in the first place? Because he was in a brawl between Jewish and Arab kids.

And you can’t do anything to the Jewish kids? No.