| NURIT KEDAR/TERESA SMITH WAR STORIES: FOR C4 NEWS
|
|
|
| |
|
| SHAI SYNC I felt like a boy in a Spielberg film. Wow! So many soldiers and everybody moving forward…. You feel like you're part of some terrifying power.
|
|
| OHAD SYNC It's fun; it gives you a good feeling.
|
|
| YEGEV SYNC
I knew it would be difficult to keep some morality - and I didn't succeed, because I killed people and that was wrong.
|
| Photo sequence [* NB same note as above] | COMMENTARY December 2008 Israel has had enough of Hamas rocket attacks. From the discos of Tel Aviv to the borders of Gaza, thousands of young Israeli soldiers are massing. The IDF, the Israeli Defence Force is going to war.
|
| GRAPHIC: ‘preparations’ |
|
|
| YEGEV SYNC There was an atmosphere of stressing us out as much as possible. As if they wanted to push people - to some place where they would do anything more easily….that they wouldn’t care as much about who they were shooting or what they were shooting at… |
| GRAPHIC Name: Yegev Age: 22 IDF tank gunner Operation Cast Lead
|
|
|
| OHAD Our Battalion commander got up to speak - we were waiting for him to give us some information and tell us what’s going to happen – we knew were going in the next day…. And he said - The sentence still echoes in my head to this day: he said that the entry was going to be ‘disproportionate… those words are still in my mind.. and so at this point we knew what we were getting into – that the entry would be disproportionate in terms of firepower…there’d be huge numbers of ground forces going in…
|
| GRAPHIC Name: Ohad Age: 24 IDF tank commander Operation Cast Lead |
|
|
|
COMMENTARY No soldiers from the IDF have ever spoken on camera before about just what happened on they called Operation Cast Lead.
The Israeli filmmaker, Nurit Kedar, persuaded some of them to speak for the first time, about what they did for their country.
|
|
GRAPHIC: the invasion
Archive [ITN]
|
|
|
NB** FADE TO BLACKS [FTB] TO INDICATE EDIT POINTS FOR PRECISE TRANSLATION | YEGEV SYNC
We entered the city in a big hullabaloo. Shooting like crazy. N one of us knew what we were shooting at.
|
|
| YEGEV SYNC cont/d
There were those who shot at mosques. As far as I was concerned, if they didn’t shoot at me from a specific mosque, then I had no reason to harm someone’s religion…
|
|
| OHAD SYNC
The order was very clear : if a car comes within 200 metres of me I could simply shoot at it. Shoot a shell.
|
|
|
|
|
| OHAD SYNC We needed to cleanse the neighbourhood, the buildings, the area of the neighbourhood. It sounds really terrible to say ‘cleanse’, but those were the orders. [Fade to Black] …I don't want to make a mistake with the words … I don't remember if it was the squadron or the battalion commander… but with a laser, he simply marked for us the line of homes that were to be hit. He said clearly: “every house gets a shell.” That was the assignment and it was our job, the tanks, to do it.
|
| ARCHIVE ALL EX ITN & AUDIO voices of: 1. JONATHAN RUGMAN 2. TZIPI LIVNI [ISRAELI FM] 3. NEIL CONNERY
| ARCHIVE – SOUND MONTAGE 1.The Israeli Airforce claims it has now hit more than 1000 targets….. 2.This is an on-going long war against terror….. 3. On Gaza’s Streets, ambulance crews rush to their latest call…. |
| GRAHPHIC December 2008 |
|
|
| YEGEV SYNC Every time we got out of our tanks, there was always this thing of comparing who had killed more. It was completely disgusting. All the time they would come and say: “Great! We heard you killed two yesterday” And I was like – ‘what’s great?’ That’s something good? It’s not good… |
|
GRAPHIC: January 2009
ARCHIVE Ex ITN C4 NEWS audio of Jonathan Rugman
| ARCHIVE ‘…The crump of tank shells can be heard landing every few minutes, along with the rattle of machine-gun fire…and thousands of troops are now engaged....’
|
|
|
|
|
| OHAD SYNC We would fire a shell on to the top of the building and a shell at the bottom. This is what caused all the civilians to leave. With white flags in the dark, at night. Families with children, without anything, without bags: with no preparation.
The moment the building got the second shell, I would watch the procession of the family leaving the building.
|
| ARCHIVE ITN/C4NEWS
Aston: January 2009 | ARCHIVE - WOMAN SPEAKING January 2009
Woman: The tanks were here and we leave the house and walk.
Reporter: Where did you go?
Woman: When we left the house, we just walked and walked in the dark. We didn't know where to go. There was bombing and shooting. My kids were crying….I was crying.
|
|
| OHAD SYNC You'd see this procession of a family and it shocked me. Where had they been until now? Where had they been hiding? Why didn't they come out right at the start? Why did they wait during all those days of fighting? When you see it for the first time - with the stick of wood and the white flag attached… the white flag that they carried - with all the children and all the babies … [Pause]
It doesn't matter - you'd call your soldiers to go out and look at it. …But on the other hand, you'd be terribly alert. You'd follow them with your eyes and you'd have your hand on the trigger.
|
| ITN/C4NEWS [same as above] | ARCHIVE - WOMAN SPEAKING: They have houses, we have houses. Why? Why?
|
|
| YEGEV SYNC For a few days we shooting at the chicken coops. I thought it was idiotic. Yes! At the chickens! ‘Deterrent fire’, they called it. Every hour we had to shoot a few rounds from the machine gun at the chicken coops. Why?! To deter people – or to deter chickens? I don’t know… I always tried to aim up in the sky so that I’d miss them. In the end it’s a person’s livelihood…. And these are chickens: they hadn’t harmed anyone!
|
| GRAPHIC: ‘living in Gaza’
NB: Music Lady Gaga – details as above as above Photo sequence - details as above. |
Commentary
As soldiers do the world over, these men took photographs of their tour of duty inside Gaza.
Images of young Israeli men barricaded in Palestinian homes.
PAUSE
Their graffiti on the walls. Here, beneath the Star of David it says: “am yisrael chai!" or “long live the people of Israel!”
There’s an almost festive atmosphere in some of the pictures.
|
|
| SHAI SYNC
The house we were in - we'd taken it over from the conscripts…and the conscripts had left all sorts of surprises for us.
In the bathroom, they'd been defecating. The bathroom was filled with excrement.
|
| GRAPHIC Name: SHAY Age: 30 Reservist
IDF elite combat unit Operation Cast Lead
|
|
|
| SHAI SYNC
On the family photographs on the walls of the house: on the faces of the children, they’d drawn glasses and moustaches.
They'd been writing things on the walls and they'd used all the clothes of this family to cover up the windows….You need clothes, of course, to darken the house….
And all the time we were there, you could sense this family with us. Meaning they were there PAUSE We defecated on the roof upstairs…. The roof was unfinished and it had sand on it. So we defecated in bags up there….
We tried everyday to wash up and clean up after ourselves.
It was clearly the house of a prosperous, well-off family. There was a big chandelier on the ceiling and there were sofas….
|
| PHOTOS REPRISE + MUSIC [CLEARED] |
|
|
| YEGEV SYNC I think I was in Zeitoun. I don't remember exactly, but it was a house a few storeys high. On the second floor, there were some terrorists shooting and throwing down grenades at us.
I aimed well and I fired.
But there 30 seconds before that, when I was looking at him, and many thoughts ran through my mind: it was that this person was also fighting at this moment for something and that he is in exactly the same situation as me…and that there isn't so much difference between him and me…
I really looked him in the eye. He couldn't see me of course, because I was looking at him through the viewfinder, but I watched him for half a minute.
|
|
| SHAI SYNC I've just remembered something else. When we left Gaza, I left a letter for the family. For the family in Gaza where we were, in the house. I left them a letter on the door saying that we're sorry for all we did - although we had no choice and that we went there to protect our families. But that we were sorry for all the mess and what we left. And that one day I hope we can live in this land as neighbours.
|
| GRAPHIC: ‘Afterwards’
Archive – ITN Music cleared
|
|
|
| OHAD – I feel good, I am proud of what I did. No one can tell me that I'm a war criminal because I know what I did, what my friends did, and what the people around me did and what the targets were that I received from my commanders. So no one can tell me or my friends that we’re war criminals.
|
|
| YEGEV SYNC
I'll never forget that 2-storey building and the 30 seconds I had eye contact with that guy. I shot him half a minute later. It's something I'll never forget.
It's hard to forget something like that.
|
|
|
SHAI SYNC My wife and my mum had a surprise for me. What surprise? Well, my mum bought me a new plasma TV. So, I entered our home and saw the new telly. Now I'm not mad on television, but my mum thought I'd be so happy to see the plasma. They'd hung up new shelves, and painted the walls – they’d fixed up the house, so I returned to a renovated home. All clean, newly-decorated.
PAUSE.
And I stood and looked at the house and I just couldn't accept it.
I wouldn't agree to this because at that moment I saw the house that we had left in Gaza and the family.
Of course, their house remained but most of the neighbourhood where that house stood was gone now.
And I knew that when that family returned to that house in Gaza - What would they see?
All the shit, all their clothes, all the beds where the soldiers with their shoes had been sleeping… All the holes in the walls…All their clothes torn-up…. The smell of the soldiers with our weapons.
And here I am in a new house, renovated with a plasma TV. And it's at this point that everything changed.
The pain began to come, the sadness - and the tears.
|
|
| END |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|