Israeli soldiers break their silence: “I saw the bodies of two children. I had done it. Win to vomit”

“I suffer from flashbacks of that event Cabo in his invasion of the Gaza Strip, in statements to the Israeli newspaper .

In his case, he details without caution what happened just three months ago, at the end of May, in Beit Lahia, north of Yabalia when, suddenly, one of his teammates began shouting “Terrorists, terrorists!” And everything became a hell of bullets, shrapnel and dust. He does it after, like other colleagues, his participation in the military campaign and has taken its toll in terms of mental health and psychological sequelae.

Yoni’s story in the Israeli progressive newspaper constitutes a small portrait, an approach to what a person who realizes that he is pressing the trigger against innocent civilians can feel. And that tomorrow and the next day he will have to do it again. How these caps leave them irreparable injuries. Of whom also understands that their mental sequelae are not as irreparable as those of the lives that mow with their.

“The commander arrived and said: ‘It’s his fault, that’s the war'”

In this sense, the dire day that recalls Yoni suggests that the routine within the army is not expected during learning and training. In the ranks of the Nahal Brigade, that day of the end of May the soldier walked carefree through the housing ruins. They were waiting, not a heroic movement of another unit or a hostage rescue of Hollywood film, but to get heavy machinery. No, neither a armored armor for an intricate operation. I was waiting for an excavator to demolish the kneading of debris and iron that were previously Palestinian homes.

“I never imagined that I would do this during my service. That I would become heavy machinery security guard,” Yoni reflected until he heard the aforementioned cry that warned of the presence of “terrorists.” The moments that happened to that alarm were worthy of a. “We entered a frenzy, and I got on the Negev [ametralladora ligera que puede ser utilizada como arma de posición] Immediately and started shooting hundreds of bullets. Then we loaded forward, and I realized that it had been a mistake, “admits the soldier.

When Yoni was aware of the result of that he did not find Hamas terrorists among the bloody corpses machine -gunned. They were smaller bodies. “I saw the bodies of two children, about 8 or 10 years old, I have no idea,” the soldier acknowledged to Harezdescribing that “there was blood everywhere, many signs of shooting, I knew that everything was my fault, that I had done it.” It was then that “I wanted to vomit.”

Moments later, he understood that his feeling was not shared by all members of the Israeli army: “After a few minutes, the company’s commander arrived and said coldly, as if it were not a human being: ‘They entered an extermination zone,'”.

An Israeli sniper: “They shouted on the radio: ‘Why are they not knocking them down?'”

Yoni was able to contact an officer in charge of care for mental health problems. After telling him what was happening to him, he ended up being separated from the combat tasks. “I told him everything and explained that there is a concept called ‘moral damage’. He said it is a state in which you act against your own values ​​and you are trapped in a kind of dissonance between the values ​​in which you believe and your behavior,” he summarized.

But another ex -member of the Nahal Brigade does not serve a change of unity. Benny needs to leave IDF. No, he was not a soldier, he was one of the snipers of that troop. Your mission? The most common – in the few moments that Tel Aviv allows it – was what the Israel army calls as control of the humanitarian aid distribution points: “Every day we have the same mission: ensure humanitarian aid in the north of the Gaza Strip.” Those queues that have become the one that they are murdered civilly looking for food desperately.

Benny explains to the Israeli newspaper that the routine that ended with his mental health was deeply marked. Madruga to be at three in the morning in its nest, to wait for the arrival of trucks between half past seven and half past eight in the morning. At that time is when civilian familics approach to find a better position in the tail. But that path interferes with a line that takes away Benny’s dream. What for them is a row, for him it is “a line that, if they cross it, I can shoot them.” And he does. More than fifty times every day.

“It’s like playing the cat and mouse. They try to come from a different direction every time, and I am there with the sniper rifle, and the officers shout at me: ‘He ends with him, ends with him!'”, He recalls to make it clear that his ‘goals’ has been dehumanized in his mind. “Shot between 50 and 60 bullets a day; I have stopped counting the casualties. I have no idea how many I have killed, many children,” he says.

Like Yoni, Benny also confirms that the Israeli high command only cares out olos results, when the expected results go to kill anyone who crosses an imaginary line, although it is clear that he is an unarmed child. “The battalion commander shouted on the radio: ‘Why are they not knocking them down? They come towards us. This is dangerous,'” he recalls some orders and threats he listened to when he decided not to press the trigger. But he ended up doing it: “We felt that they were placing us in an impossible situation, and no one had prepared us for this. The officers do not care if children die, nor what that does to me in my soul. For them, I am just one more tool.”

Among those psychological sequelae, Benny tells Harez That every time something smells like it does not like, it immediately receives a blow of a kind of synesthesia that returns the smell of the bodies that he caused. However, that is during the day, the nights are a lot of worse, among nightmares as he has come to kill his whole family. “I wake up five or six times per night. I see all the people I killed again. You have to understand that a sniper is not like a pilot: Go to its victims through the telescopic sight. It is horrible,”, tries to explain the sniper.