Written by William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill
Scottish historian
This horrifying report in @Haaretz now almost reads nostalgically: these days the snipers aim to kill “42 Knees in One Day”: Israeli Snipers Open Up About Shooting Gaza Protesters. [The report is from March 2020].
Over 200 Palestinians were killed and nearly 8,000 were injured during almost two years of weekly protests at the Israel-Gaza border. Israeli army snipers tell their stories.
“I know exactly how many knees I’ve hit, says Eden, who completed his service in the Israel Defense Forces as a sniper in its Golani infantry brigade six months ago. I kept the casing of every round I fired. I have them in my room. So I don’t have to make an estimate – I know: 52 definite hits.”
“You have to understand that before we showed up, knees were the hardest thing to rack up. There was a story about one sniper who had 11 knees all told, and people thought no one could outdo him. And then I brought in seven-eight knees in one day.”
Eden said he broke the “knee record” during the demonstration on May 14, 2008, the day the US embassy in Jerusalem was inaugurated. “On that day, our pair had the largest number of hits, 42 in all. My locator wasn’t supposed to shoot, but I gave him a break, because we were getting close to the end of our stint, and he didn’t have knees,” Eden said.
“In the end you want to leave with the feeling that you did something, that you weren’t a sniper during exercises only. So, after I had a few hits, I suggested to him that we switch. He got around 28 knees there, I’d say,” he added.
Eden remembers shooting his first knee in the early period of the protests in “which you were allowed to shoot a major inciter only if he was standing still”. After receiving authorisation to shoot, he shoots and remembers “the view of the knee in the crosshairs, bursting open”
Written by William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill
Scottish historian