Last week, the Israeli dissident organization "Shovrim Shtika" (Hebrew), or "Breaking the Silence" (English), has released a booklet with 111 soldier testimonies from last summer's war on Gaza.
The testimonies are available as a PDF booklet in Hebrew and English, and also online in single stories - again in Hebrew and English. Some testimonies are available in video.
My far more diligent Adalah teammate, subir, has diaried quite a bit about the testimonies, with many excerpts (see his Diaries One, Two and Three). Here I wanted to point out the most glaring aspect of the testimonies as a whole - one that is completely missed because it is an absence, not a presence.
The diary title hints at what I'm referring to. Below the testimony - and the fold - I will elaborate (not for too long). The testimony is also a hint.
The whole ‘roof knocking’ thing (a practice in which a small missile is fired at the roof of a building as an advance warning that it will shortly be destroyed in an air strike) was understood [by Hamas] very quickly. Hamas forces are very light, really, and for them – in contrast to the general [Gaza Strip] population, and this is the great tragedy –‘roof knocking’ gave them enough time to go down into some burrow, or to run between the houses and vanish from the area.But for a family with a grandmother who’s sitting in the living room, it’s a bit harder. And that, too, is part of the whole thing. ...you would often get a lot of data that says, 'such-and-such a number of uninvolved civilians were wounded'
From Testimony 82, by a lieutenant in the IDF Gaza Division