Breaking the Silence › Israeli soldiers talk about the occupied territories

When we first entered [the Gaza Strip], when we took over houses, there was this thing of ‘provoking’ the area. If you’re standing for hours and the tank is idle, you don’t start driving back and forth. There’s no comparison between a tank that’s in motion and a tank that’s idle. An idle tank is 1,000 times more vulnerable, and you can’t just drive around for seven hours if you’re stationed at a certain building. So once in a while there were steps we would take to ‘provoke’ the area. What does that mean? It means machine gun fire at ‘suspicious spots.’