Israel soldier calls order during Gaza assault 'murder'

One of my soldiers came to me and asked, "Why?" I said, "What isn't clear? We don't want to kill innocent civilians." He goes, "Yeah? Anyone who's in there is a terrorist, that's a known fact." I said, "Do you think the people there will run away? No one will run away." He says, "That's clear," and then his buddies join in, "We need to murder any person who's in there. Yeah, any person who's in Gaza is a terrorist," and all the other things that they stuff our heads with, in the media.

And then I try to explain to the guy that not everyone in there is a terrorist, and that after he kills, say, three children and four mothers, we'll go upstairs and kill another 20 or so people. . . . I tried to explain why we had to let them leave. . . . It didn't really help. This is really frustrating, to see that they understand that inside Gaza you are allowed to do anything you want, to break down doors for no other reason than it's cool.

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Aviv then described how a sharpshooter killed an elderly woman who had come within 100 yards of a commandeered house.

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ZAMIR: I don't understand. Why did he shoot her?

AVIV: That's what is so nice, supposedly, about Gaza: You see a person on a road. . . . He doesn't have to be with a weapon . . . and you can just shoot him. With us it was an old woman, on whom I didn't see any weapon. The order was to take that person out, that woman, the moment you see her.

ZVI: Aviv's descriptions are accurate, but it's possible to understand where this is coming from. And that woman . . . she wasn't supposed to be there, because there were announcements and there were bombings. Logic says she shouldn't be there. The way you describe it, as murder in cold blood, that isn't right. It's known they have lookouts.

GILAD: Even before we went in, the battalion commander made it clear to everyone that a very important lesson from the second Lebanon war was the way the [army] goes in: with a lot of fire. The intention was to protect soldiers' lives by means of firepower. In the operation, the [army's] losses really were light and the price was that a lot of Palestinians got killed.

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Ram, who serves in a Givati Brigade operations company, described a sniper's killing of a woman and her two children as they walked near a no-go area by mistake.

ZAMIR: After a killing like that, do they do some sort of investigation in the [army]?

MOSHE: The attitude is very simple: It isn't pleasant to say so, but no one cares at all. We aren't investigating this. This is what happens during fighting and this is what happens during routine security.

ZAMIR: Among the pilots, is there talk or thoughts of remorse? For example, I was terribly surprised by the enthusiasm surrounding the killing of the Gaza traffic police on the first day of the operation. They took out 180 traffic cops. As a pilot, I would have questioned that.

GIDEON: Tactically speaking, you call them "police." In any case, they are armed and belong to Hamas.

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boudreaux@latimes.com