But on that day in Beit Lahia, something happened, says Yoni (a psyeudonym, as are the names of other interviewees). “Terrorists, terrorists,” one soldier shouted. “We go into a frenzy, and I get on the Negev [a machinegun] right away and start spraying, firing hundreds of bullets. We then charged forward, and I realized it was a mistake.”
There were no terrorists there. “I saw the bodies of two children, maybe 8 or 10 years old, I have no idea,” recalls Yoni. “There was blood everywhere, lots of signs of gunfire, I knew it was all on me, that I did this. I wanted to throw up. After a few minutes, the company commander arrived and said coldly, as if he wasn’t a human being, ‘They entered an extermination zone, it is their fault, this is what war is like.’”
Death death death to the IDF!