'We helped an old Palestinian man who was lying on grenades'

Since last summer's Operation Protective Edge, Israel has become a punching bag for many players throughout the world. Accusations of supposed war crimes have been thrown about by human rights organizations, and a U.N. report published last week only added to the anti-Israeli atmosphere.

But those who fought in the narrow alleys of Gaza are unwilling to let their names be smeared.

"We set out on a justified war to protect the civilians of Israel. In war, people die, but I'm not willing to be compared to someone who commits war crimes," says Lt. Col. Betzalel Schneid, commander of the 932nd Nahal Battalion.

A year after the Gaza operation, I met with Schneid and the commander of the 9th Armored Battalion, Lt. Col. Ofir Zilberstein. The two fought together in the combat team of the 401st Brigade, and are eager to respond to anyone who opposes how the IDF conducted itself in the Gaza Strip.

"It would be naive for us to expect that the world support us. Most of the U.N. is always against us. And because of the atmosphere that's been created we never thought they would say that we were an outstanding example for the rest of the world," Schneid says.

Discussing the U.N. report, Schneid noted that "Syria isn't an outstanding example for the rest of the world, either, to put it mildly, and I don't remember that it was attacked the way that Israel is attacked. In war, things happen [such as civilians being harmed], but we do everything to ensure that those things won't occur. Sometimes we took risks that wouldn't be taken anywhere else in the world to minimize harm to civilians, but in spite of that there were incidents that we wouldn't have wanted. I can't say for sure that an innocent civilian was killed."

Zilberstein emphasized that he and his forces, too, operated according to the terms of ethical warfare.

"We did everything to avoid harming civilians, but it's war, and in war incidents happen. I didn't encounter -- not during the fighting and not afterward -- events that I felt crossed the line," he said.

"There were cases where we'd come to a home, not touch it, and then a bomb would explode inside the walls. Later we'd find out it was a Hamas weapons cache. So it begs the question why we didn't attack the house before that."

During the Gaza operation, Schneid says, he was informed by command headquarters that someone had been heard crying where the fighting was taking place.

"We looked and found a Palestinian man about 60, lying wounded on the ground, crying from the pain," he said. "Our medical [team] treated him, gave him some of our water to drink. During the treatment they had to roll him over to lift him onto the stretcher. When we rolled him, we saw two grenades underneath him. After a couple of minutes, he put a hand under his body, shouted 'Allahu akbar' and threw a grenade. Only then did we kill him. And that's just one example of what the IDF's values are."

According to Schneid, "In the first days [of the war] we attacked a few houses, but we didn't attack a bunch of houses that were 700 meters away from the tunnel we were dealing with. From one of those houses, a sniper shot my logistics officer and wounded him seriously. Actually, we did the minimum amount of damage possible, and sometimes that exacted a price. I'm very proud of how my people fought and the commands we were given."

Zilberstein says that "there was a lot of time spent on the clear rules of what we were allowed to do and what we weren't, for every last soldier. There were very few cases in which we attacked buildings and there weren't secondary explosions [caused by stored explosives]."

Both commanders remarked on the full cooperation between their forces, which began when they trained together before the start of the operation.

"The cooperation and the shared language created in training and during the battle proved that the power of the tank and getting into the tiniest details of infantry warfare led to success," Schneid concludes.

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