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03/12/2006:

"West Bank tours reveal the grim reality of Israeli occupation"

On the top floor of a commandeered Palestinian home in the West Bank city of Hebron, Yehuda Shaul, a former Israeli soldier, stood at the centre of a group of rapt German tourists and told them about the time he unleashed his grenade launcher on local gunmen.

"I was trained with the grenade gun. That was my mission," he said. "But we were shooting at houses 800 metres away, so of course you hit innocent targets too."

When Mr Shaul talks about innocent targets, he means Palestinian civilians. Yet he is not afraid to tell stories from his 14 months service in the Israeli army in Hebron.

"Could we fire grenades at areas where Palestinians lived? Sure. Why not?" he asked, describing many Israeli army actions breaking the army's own rules of engagement. "It was fun. It was cool. Could we shut 2,000 Palestinian shops with a curfew on a whim? Why not?"

In the past nine months, Mr Shaul and the Breaking the Silence group he founded has led more than 40 groups totalling 1,200 people around the divided city of Hebron, where 500 Jewish settlers live at the heart of a Palestinian population of more than 100,000.

The tourists pay nothing bar transport costs, but they are given a no-holds-barred insider view of the effect that Israel's Hebron settlements - and the hundreds of combat troops which protect them - have on the city's Palestinian population.
telegraph.co.uk