(MEMO) Israeli snipers who
participated in the internationally-condemned crackdown on Palestinian
protesters in the Gaza Strip have boasted of their actions in interviews with Haaretz.
“I kept the casing of every
round I fired,” said one former sniper from the Golani infantry brigade. “I
have them in my room. So I don’t have to make an estimate – I know: 52 definite
hits.”
Asked how this compared to
others from his battalion, Eden (not his real name) replied: “From the point of
view of hits, I have the most. In my battalion they would say: ‘Look, here
comes the killer’.”
“You have to understand that
before we showed up, knees were the hardest thing to rack up. There was a story
about one sniper who had 11 knees all told, and people thought no one could
outdo him. And then I brought in seven-eight knees in one day. Within a few
hours, I almost broke his record.”
According to Haaretz,
of dozens of snipers approached by the newspaper, six – all of them now
discharged from the military – agreed to be interviewed.
Eden boasted of breaking the
“knee record” during the demonstration on 14 May 2018.
“On that day, our pair had the
largest number of hits, 42 in all. My locator wasn’t supposed to shoot, but I
gave him a break, because we were getting close to the end of our stint, and he
didn’t have knees,” he told Haaretz.
“In the end you want to leave
with the feeling that you did something, that you weren’t a sniper during
exercises only. So, after I had a few hits, I suggested to him that we switch.
He got around 28 knees there, I’d say.”
During Great Return March protests, the Israeli
military authorised snipers to target so-called “main inciters”, a category
which Haaretz noted is defined by “quite vague” criteria.
A Golani sniper squad
commander claimed: “It’s not so complicated to figure out who’s organizing and
firing up [the other protesters]. You identify him, for example, by the fact
that he has his back to you and is facing the crowd. In many cases, he’s also
holding a megaphone.”
The snipers spoken to by the
paper explained how the chain of command worked during the protests. “For every
sniper there was a commander at a junior level [a non-com], like me, and also a
senior commander – a company commander or a deputy company commander,” said ‘Amir’.
“The superior officer would
request authorisation to fire from the sector’s brigade commander. He would get
on the radio to him and ask: ‘Can I add another knee for this afternoon?’”
Another sniper, ‘Daniel’, said
procedures were more flexible in practice. “In general, you had to request
authorisation for shooting from your superior officer and he requested
authorisation from the company commander or the battalion commander.”
“If it worked like it’s
supposed to, it could take less than 10 seconds. The commanders were not
particularly stingy with shooting authorisations. They would trust you when you
said you had identified a justifiable target.”
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