On 1 January, the air force attacked the home of Nizar Rayan, a Hamas leader in Gaza. Eighteen civilians were killed in the assault on his home, most of whom were members of his family. The following day senior leaders of Hamas’ military wing were targeted. When the air force reported the people harmed, tension filled the room in anticipation of finding out whether the people injured were the targeted objectives of the attack. When it became clear that they were other unrelated persons, cries of disappointment were heard. Not because people had been killed arbitrarily, but because they weren’t the people we were looking for. It’s hard for me to imagine what my base would have looked like during the recent Operation Protective Edge. Probably just as it had in the past, only much more pronounced. That was the peak of my service within the Israeli army. The period during which I collected information on people who were accused of attacking Israelis, trying to attack Israelis, the desire to harm Israelis, thinking of attacking Israelis, in addition to collecting information on completely innocent people, whose only crime was that they interested the Israeli defence establishment for various reasons. Reasons they have no way of knowing. If you’re homosexual and know someone who knows a wanted person – and we need to know about it – Israel will make your life miserable. If you need emergency medical treatment in Israel, the West Bank or abroad – we searched for you. The state of Israel will allow you to die before we let you leave for treatment without giving information on your wanted cousin. If you interest Unit 8200 as a technological unit, and don’t have anything to do with any hostile activity, you’re an objective. Any such case, in which you “fish out” an innocent person from whom information might be squeezed, or who could be recruited as a collaborator, was like striking gold for us and for Israel’s entire intelligence community. As such, Palestinians who are not related to or involved in fighting Israel are objectives. Thus, in terms of intelligence (aside from the physical blockade of the Gaza Strip), Gazan citizens are no different from their brethren in the West Bank – despite the “disengagement”, so to speak. During my training course in preparation for my service in this assigned role, we actually learned to memorise and filter different words for “gay”, in Arabic. Any Palestinian is exposed to non-stop monitoring by the Israeli Big Brother, without legal protection, and with no way of knowing when they too would become an objective – targeted for harassment, extortion, or physical injury. Junior soldiers can decide anyone is a target for the collection of information. There is no procedure in place to determine whether the violation of the individual’s rights is necessarily justifiable. The notion of rights for Palestinians does not exist at all. Throughout the duration of my service no one in my unit ever asked, at least not out loud, if there is anything wrong with this well-oiled system – whether the transformation of any individual into a target is a legitimate act. At the conclusion of my service in the army I was a commander and instructor for several months, teaching youth who had graduated from high school and were being prepared to serve as translators for the Intelligence Corps. I repeatedly tried to raise these questions with them: is it legitimate to deem as a target any person who interests the Israeli security system, for whatever reason? The answer I received, time and again, was yes. Today I believe the answer is no. ‘The fact people were innocent was not at all relevant’