On my daily routine I walked around with my soldiers in a standard patrol in the Kasbah, walking among the stores and stopping and searching people, and there are all sorts of ways to do that. There are commanders who do it in a manner that really angers the local population. You come with force and grab someone, and you pin him to the wall and you treat him this way, so of course he hates you, it’s completely obvious.

You walk around in a Palestinian neighborhood and decide that a particular person needs to be checked. According to what? There are databases with names of people who are wanted for interrogation and they walk around. Sometimes it’s according to specific descriptions that tell us to look for someone specific. Sometimes we have photos, sometimes we only have a description, sometimes we have a name, ID number and age group. I mean, a 50-year-old, I would never stop to check his ID unless I had a specific indication about a 50-year-old.

Do you check only people who fit the description you received, or do you also check people randomly? I think there were also random checks, and the random checks had an operational rationale that actually sent a message to all [Palestinians]: guys, if there’s someone suspicious here, he can’t just easily walk around the street and be safe. It means that somebody might stop and ask him [who he is].

You mean a message to the Palestinian population? Yes. To turn these checks into something routine, random. Not anyone, but it's aimed at specific age groups and descriptions. But yes, I think that every patrol had to check a number of people every night, I don’t remember how many, but you had to do a few.

Every patrol set out with an order: you have to run 50 or 100 IDs through for a check? Yes, my numbers were lower, but yes, we had to run a certain number, yes.