At the situation assessments you had, was there any discussion of changes in violent activity by Jews or settlers? They talked about an escalation, definitely an escalation. I remember that when I first started the job, it wasn’t even an issue to deal with. It took time before the army realized that this was an issue and happening a lot.

What did it consist of? Cutting down olive trees, ‘price tag’ settler actions in the form of graffiti, setting mosques on fire, events we hear about in the media. Also lots of incidents where settlers threw stones at soldiers and stuff like that, or gathered around houses that were being evacuated. Most of the time I served there was during the ‘freeze’.

The settlement freeze. There was no construction taking place. It’s funny to say “there was no construction” – officially, there was no construction taking place, so it was less of an issue.

What do you mean, “officially there was no construction taking place”? What we know is that (the official decision) is one thing and reality on the ground is something completely different. The figures on the construction freeze were very specific: this many orders have been issued, this many people did or did not evacuate their houses. You get these figures ‘as is’, usually from the DCO, and I can’t tell you how credible they are. Another thing is how we counted the Palestinians who were killed or wounded by settlers. For a long, time we counted them one against the other. We’d count every (Israeli) civilian wounded by Palestinians, and every Palestinian wounded by settlers. At some point, the numbers rose, it was a specific period with more settler violence and more wounded Palestinians. As soon as those figures rose, they decided that we’d stop counting each Palestinian wounded by settler violence or shooting; the army’s not involved in that, and what has it got to do with the army. So the resulting picture was not exactly equal.

But the army controls things on the ground, it’s important for the army to know what’s going on. The idea was that when the numbers of wounded are presented, I want to know what the army is involved in. To be fair, it should be pointed out that this statistic was presented weekly. The log specified “four Palestinians killed by shooting during suspect arrest procedures, and another four wounded by settler violence”. But on the level of statistics presented twice or once a year or in total, they’d subtract that figure from the total tally of wounded people.

Is this something that happened every week? Yes. I believe that almost every week, (a Palestinian) was wounded by settler violence. Settler violence can be a fight or stone-throwing. There is always the question of who started it, but the same way that you count Palestinians, you should also count… Usually the wounds were from ‘dry violence’, as it’s called. Sometimes it was more severe. There were Molotov cocktails, and once a settler opened fire.

Where? This incident was even filmed. You see a Palestinian throwing a stone at a settler or something like that, and then the settler approaches him and shoots him, and the Palestinian was killed, I think. This happened in the Nablus area.

How many Palestinians were killed by settlers during the time you were there? A handful. Mostly, a lot of people were wounded.

How many is a lot? Dozens. Dozens wounded by settler violence.

All over the West Bank. Yes. Because they didn’t always count separately, how many were injured by settlers and how many by the army. I can say that, overall, the number of Palestinians who were wounded rose from 2010 to 2011.