Rompono il silenzio, i soldati israeliani. Rompono il silenzio sull’Operazione Piombo Fuso, e lo fanno – appunto – con Breaking the Silence, l’associazione israeliana che ha cominciato anni fa il suo lavoro con le testimonianze dei soldati a Hebron (una sorta di autodenuncia dei loro comportamenti nei confronti della popolazione civile palestinese).
Ora Breaking the Silence rende pubbliche testimonianze terribili, su quei 22 giorni a Gaza. Sulle regole d’ingaggio, sul fosforo bianco, sulle distruzioni, sui civili usati come scudi umani. Il materiale (e ci sono decine di interviste video) è sul sito dell’associazione.
Intanto, un ‘assaggio’. Sulle regole d’ingaggio:
Is this something you were told?
It’s something that was said: he (the battalion commander) said it and at the moment I was quite sure of what he meant. I pretty much agreed with him. He said: “Not a hair will fall off a soldier of mine, and I am not willing to allow a soldier of mine to risk himself by hesitating. If you are not sure – shoot. If there is doubt then there is no doubt”. We understood this and said that it’s not because people wanted to kill, to collect hits or glory. It’s because they wanted to preserve human lives at any cost. We all know, we’re all living in this country and know that the soft belly is casualties in all of the wars, and they simply wanted to stick to this, completely. Let alone abduction procedure and such things, where the instruction was explicit – if you’re not sure, kill. Fire power was insane. We went in and the booms were just mad. The minute we got to our starting line, we simply began to fire at suspect places. Also, it was still dark when we went in, we got there just before dawn. You see a house, a window, shoot at the window. You don’t see a terrorist there? Fire at the window. It was real urban warfare. This is the difference between urban warfare and a limited confrontation. In urban warfare, anyone is your enemy. No innocents. It was simply urban warfare in every way. We went in there house after house, going around each other every time. 99% of the houses were empty.
You enter houses with live fire?
No. The instruction was to get everyone out of the house or concentrate them in one room. Announce it through loudspeakers. Give it a few minutes, and if the person is not out after 2-5 minutes, whoever is left inside is a dead man. Whoever comes out – assemble them outside or in one of the lower rooms, and then go upstairs with live fire. This was the instruction, and it was not always followed because often the houses were empty. So why waste ammunition? Just shooting for fun? Some people did but this was not always the case. Eventually there were no confrontations at all and people were disappointed and began to let off steam and simply shoot. In general people (Palestinians) came downstairs, we’d order them to go over there, point in some direction and tell them to go there. They’d protest, ‘But this is our home. We have nowhere to go,’ and we… These were the orders, if not on the battalion level, then from the brigade or a general army instruction. I don’t know. But it’s not something the platoon or company commander decided on the spot. It was obvious when we went in that the people are not allowed to stay inside the houses. We directed them towards a certain
area hoping they wouldn’t be hit there. In our designated area we directed them southwards in the Gaza Strip towards where our forces were not present. We sent them south. We did not abuse them. But it hurts when five mothers, an old woman and little children look at you and the woman says “I have nowhere to go” and there’s nothing you can do. It has to happen. You toughen up. You look her in the eye and say: “Over there.” And they walk away. As soon as someone comes out, you announce that these are innocents moving south and usually it
also happens in daytime, not nighttime. The houses are taken over and we set ourselves inside according to plan.