© Louise GreenAvner Gvaryahu, Executive Director of Breaking the Silence
A former Israeli soldier has said that it is the responsibility of Israeli citizens to call for an end to the occupation in order to put an end to the suffering of the Palestinians.
During an interview with
BBC HARDtalk last week, Avner Gvaryahu, executive director of Breaking the Silence, spoke about the organisation's mission to collect testimonies from Israeli soldiers who witnessed the crimes of the military against the Palestinian people.
A former paratrooper in the army, he spoke of his personal experience as a soldier and the operations he was made to carry out.
"I was the sergeant of a snipers team and one of the routine missions we carried out in Nablus, in Jenin or the surrounding areas of those two cities, was a mission that we call a Straw Widow; you would take over a Palestinian home. Every house in the West Bank actually has a number, each and every house has a number, so we would open up the maps and look at the specific house that looked into the right place that we had to enter, and after we would verify that the house has the best parameters, windows and geographical area, we made sure that the people in the house were innocent. So we would enter a house of an innocent Palestinian home in the middle of the night," he explained.
Avner Gvaryahu, Breaking the Silence's executive director interviews to BBC
HARDtalk with Stephen Sackur.
Comment: Further reading: The IDF vs The Teenage Girl: Palestinian Activist Ahed Tamimi Arrested For Slapping Soldiers Who Shot Boy