If there are photos of shahids, this is a computer with clear hostile destructive activity, we have to take it.
One night, since we were many, many soldiers we had to do something, so we went to carry out Shin Bet Security Service arrests. We entered the home of a family. The father, whom we looked for, wasn't there. There was the mother and a boy who was somewhere on the border between extreme learning disability and Down syndrome, and there was a computer. Now, one of the instructions was to bring any electronic material that you find in people’s homes that you enter. Since that was the instruction, the battalion commander said: the father isn't here, take the computer and let's go. The mother began screaming and pleading that we leave the computer. When we asked her why, she said it's the only thing her son could do. That if he won't have the computer he would, like, go crazy, and also [there's a] curfew, he can't leave the house. We said let's forget it, we'll check the computer and see what happens. They turned on the computer. On the desktop there were photos of shahids (martyrs). For my battalion commander that was enough. He said, fine, if there are photos of shahids, this is a computer with clear hostile destructive activity, we have to take it. We said to him listen, it's as if you'd go now to the computer of an Israeli kid, you'll find photos of soccer players. Everybody admires their heroes, what can you do? Here they admire the shahids, these are their heroes at the moment. [So] they held an entire company outside, securing us while we checked the whole computer to make sure it doesn't have evidence hinting at hostile destructive activity on behalf of the retarded kid. Ultimately my battalion commander was persuaded that we could leave the computer because there was no hostile stuff installed on the computer, while all of us clearly saw that the whole situation was completely silly, because, first of all, we can't really determine that, and, second, the person (the father) wasn't arrested, he wasn't a known member of a terror group, he was someone we could pressure.
How do you know that? It's part of the briefing. It wasn't a 'hot' arrest, it was 'cold' arrest that probably didn't necessitate the use of weapons. In fact, from my point of view, it was the essence of the stupidity of our stay in the territories. You enter a family's house in the middle of the night, you wake them up, try to find someone who isn't there, and then try to cause the damage you can cause, because you've already dragged over an entire company, at least let's get something, and in this case it was to take a computer from a kid with a serious disability.