MOSCOW, November 19 (Sputnik) — Israeli drone commanders are forced to make life and death decisions within seconds and struggle to avoid civilian deaths, an Heron TP mission commander said in a video interview published by The Telegraph on Wednesday.
"The territory is so small. You're having a military conflict inside a zone that is 40 kilometers long to sometimes two or three kilometers wide, and it's really, really hard to differentiate terrorists from uninvolved civilians on such a small territory," said Israeli drone commander Major Yair, whose real name was not revealed by the newspaper.
"The window of opportunities you have is sometimes as long as 20 seconds. You have to spot something, you have to interpret and you make to make a call… you have to make these calls in seconds and these are life and death calls," he added.
Showing footage shot by an Israeli Heron drone, the commander pointed to a group of people running from under a screen of trees to a nearby street. "That's a thermal image of a rocket unit setting up timers for rockets to be launched later on to Israel," he said. "They're evacuating to the nearest street, trying to take cover using kids and uninvolved civilians as a human shield".
"Surely, I've made some mistakes before," admitted the 31-year-old drone commander, who, according to The Telegraph, served during the last three Gaza wars.
"I live with that because I know that acting where I act, with this impossible situation where your enemy is using his own people as human shields… They act from within those UN schools and from within those kindergartens and they make sure that they fire and a moment later they blend into the nearest population. So this impossible situation is a situation where sometimes mistakes are being made," he stated.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict escalated over the summer, when Israel launched Operation Protective Edge against the Hamas movement in response to the group's rocket attacks against Israel. More than 2,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and 68 Israelis lost their lives.
Israel and Palestine agreed on an open-ended ceasefire, brokered by the Egyptian government, on August 26.
