They would stand there in the middle of the night, each one holding their ID card and we’d photograph them.

What does mapping mean, what do you do, and what’s the briefing? It was usually midweek, since over the weekend we had to make arrests and such. We would decide on a village, pretty arbitrarily. Each time we focused on a different area, that is to say, chose four or more houses, said one, two, three, four, passing these same numbers on to the brigade so that they could authorize carrying out the mapping there. We didn’t have much of a battle procedure for mappings. They would model how to close in on the house and approach the target, what to do in the house, situations and responses, etc. Operating within the house itself, which means, how to treat the people inside the home, what happens if they don’t open the door, all that stuff – very comprehensive. Normally when a mapping begins, movement is on foot, also in order to allow the force to practice walking in formation. Until that moment, everything functions like an arrest procedure, the movement by foot, the closure of the home, and then we would knock on the door: “Iftach al-bab, jeish.” We go in, put the entire family in one room. Usually there was one soldier on the team, on the fireteam that went in with the team commander, who speaks Arabic. And we would start asking them questions: where does dad work, what kind of car does he have, what do they do, where do the children study, where do they work, do they throw stones, and all kind of things like that. And then one of the soldiers would sketch the structure of the house in a notebook, where the rooms are, who lives where, and the last step was to photograph them. They would stand there in the middle of the night, each one holding their ID card and we’d photograph them.

All members of the household? Yes. All household members. Why? Because if we managed to film someone throwing stones during demonstrations later on, so, like, we can crosscheck the information and know how to get to exactly where he lives and in which room. The idea is good, but we never really did anything with them [the photographs].

Who received the sketches and photographs at the end of each mapping?They remained with us, in the company.

And what did you do with it? We would pass it on to the company’s NCO (non-commissioned officer). I don’t know what happened with it, he saved it in some folder. When the NCO changed without overlapping with the previous guy, he didn’t know, so it was lost.

You didn’t pass it on to the intelligence officer? No. My impression was that they don’t give a shit about it, excuse the expression. In my opinion, the effect of mapping is different. It’s to place psychological pressure on Palestinians: go into their homes, wake them up in the middle of the night, and instill in them this sense of pursecution.

At what point did you realize that the mapping materials weren’t being used? During the second mapping, when I realized there was no regulated procedure for what we were doing. I understood that it’s bullshit and that the primary purpose of the mappings is like I said, to place pressure on the population to create a sense of persecution.