Need to win war and change enemies’ education

I can still see the terrified look on his face as we both realized, in the same moment, that we had been set up.

We were in the midst of a month-long stint of IDF army reserve duty in Ramallah, during the first intifada, where daily stone throwing and Molotov cocktails had become the norm. We were into the second week of our tour and the frustration had already begun to set in, particularly on this stretch of road alongside El Bireh, a “refugee camp” on the outskirts of Ramallah. Every day, while on jeep patrol, we could get calls that rocks had been thrown by Arab youths at Israeli cars driving along the road, but by the time we got there, all we would find were the rocks strewn on the road, often along with shattered glass, and the perpetrators long gone. Until this particular afternoon: We happened to be only a few hundred yards down the road when the call came over the radio and as we came around a curve in the road, a young boy, probably no more than ten or eleven years old, was throwing a stone at a passing vehicle. So without a thought, as the jeep screeched to a halt, two of us jumped out, to give chase, while the driver stayed behind with the vehicle.

We were in such a hurry to finally catch one of these kids, that I had not even grabbed my web pouching with extra ammo and first aid. We were both running with only the ammo in our guns, with no radio, but all that was just a distant thought in the back of my mind as we were clearly gaining on this boy as we entered deeper into the back alleys of this Ramallah camp.

Finally we appeared to have him cornered as he ran into a door in a courtyard and threw it shut behind him, seconds before we arrived and began banging on the now locked door. A second later, Shmuel, the reserve soldier who was with me, let out a yell as the sound of a cinderblock exploding a foot behind us filled the air. As we turned around, we saw another huge cinderblock flying through the air from four or five stories up, and I realized we had fallen into a well-planned trap.