There was some brigade operation in some village that [the military] hadn't entered in like 10 years. I don’t remember its name.

Why did they enter it after 10 years? They told us that there is intelligence that there are weapons in the houses. We entered, four battalions. Every platoon got a house or two houses, supposedly based on intelligence. In one house most of the time he (The Palestinian owner) was with us and was yelling at us why are we doing this and like complained about us turning his house upside down. There was also a story with the grandmother there, she was there in the bed and we had to move her each time. It’s [a matter of] taking out from the closet all the sheets, all the blankets, all the things in there. Everything we took out we put in the center, we searched in the closets. And when we tried to put it back in place later, everything was messed up and things like that. The battalion commander is also making rounds and whenever he comes to your house he says okay, this is suspicious, break the wall.

What wall did you break?Under the stairs there was this area that they had painted over. It sort of looked like they had done something there so that’s where we broke the wall with the hammer. A 5[kg] hammer, basically hitting it.

And what was there? Nothing. That whole house had nothing. In the end the owner of the house like told us: You see? I told you there’s nothing here. It was the middle of rain and winter. I remember that the house was full of mud afterwards and dirt in every corner. We were wearing these waterproof suits that were full of mud and water and we brought that into the entire house.

How many soldiers were in the house?A platoon which is like 25 [soldiers].

In one house?Yes. The house was quite large, I remember like a lot of chaos there in what was happening and that. And the grandmother there, I remember the grandmother specifically, she was lying there in the bed in the room, she looked really sick, was lying there covered. There was this sort of like a moment of excitement when a toy gun was found. Everyone was sure it’s a gun. In the end the entire brigade found five knives and two hunting rifles, something like that.