teenager suspected of a gun attack on his former high school. 19—year—old nikolas cruz has appeared at court in florida, charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder. it was the 18th school attack in the us this year. cyril ramaphosa has been sworn in as south africa's new president. he replaces jacob zuma, who stepped down on wednesday after caving to pressure from his own party, the anc. and this story is trending on bbc.com. do you worry about your bags being stolen when passing through security check? well, one chinese woman joined her handbag through an x—ray machine to preventjust that. apparently she emerged safely on the other side. it's still unclear what the cherished handbag contained. that's all from me now. stay with bbc news. now on bbc news it's time for hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk.

i'm stephen sackur. the israeli defence force sees itself as an institution, which binds the nation together. most young israelis serve in its ranks after leaving school. it claims to combine defence of the state with a sense of moral purpose. my guest today served in the idf, but he sees an institution in denial, corroded and corrupted by the military occupation of palestinian communities over a 50—year span. avner gvaryahu and like—minded soldiers—turned—dissidents say they are breaking the silence. are they patriots or traitors? avner gvaryahu, welcome to hardtalk.

thank you. i think it's fair to say, the idf is probably the most sacrosanct institution in all of israel. was it hard for you to cross a line, to break the taboo and speak out against what the idf is doing? breaking the silence, i think, in any context isn't easy. definitely in the israeli society, it's not a natural thing in that sense, to break that kind of silence. but i think that myself, like over 1,000 soldiers, are a part of breaking the silence, former soldiers. it was much more difficult for me to keep my silence than to break it, and it's true that there are prices. but the truth of the matter is, i care too much for my country and my society to keep silent. and although there are push backs, we will persevere. you broke the silence after you'd

put your uniform away and left the idf. were you silent while you were a serving soldier? well, i didn't feel that i was silent. i remember occasions where i brought up what i was doing in the nights in nablus and jenin when i was back home. i thought i wasn't silent when i asked my soldiers what they thought about these operations. but it actually took me a while after my service where i actually thought that i could put my military service behind me, to realise that i, myself, was also silent. that i, myself, was also not really frank when i was looking myself in the mirror. so you were, to use that phrase, a good soldier, you followed orders and you did things, which...

and i'm now asking, rather than stating. i'm guessing you did things which your moral conscience told you you should not be doing, but you did them anyway and did not speak out against them. that's true. i mean, i was the sergeant of a snipers team, and one of the team missions we carried out in nablus, injenin or in the surrounding areas of those two cities was a mission that we call the straw widow. straw widow is when you take over a palestinian home, every house in the west bank actually has a number. each and every house has a number, so we would open up the maps and look at the specific house that looked into the right place that we had to enter, a city centre or a road. and after, we would verify that the house has the best parameters, windows and geographical area, we made sure the people in the house were innocent. so we would enter the house of an innocent palestinian home in the middle of the night. the first mission that i carried out, the adrenaline was pumping. the second, the third, the fourth, when it started to calm down, i realised i was sitting

in someone‘s living room, bedroom, children's room, that was when it started to break. and you are dealing with people in fear? constant fear. but i had to say, the fear is two sided. i was also full of fear. but i would say that what motivated me eventually to break my silence was the piercing eyes of young palestinians, when i was barging into their house in the middle of the night, i could always justify it to myself. but those eyes, the anger, their fear was what eventually helped me overcome that. a house of a physician in nablus, for example, that i entered in the middle of the night, taking him, his wife and his daughter, and pushing them in a room. if they wanted to use their bathroom or their kitchen, or use their phone, they needed permission from me. that specific house in nablus stayed with me for a while because that physician himself was kind enough and generous enough to sit down

and explain to me what it means to be a palestinian. and that experience, when i was sitting there in a house in nablus made me realise what i'm actually doing as a soldier, to millions and millions of people, me, myself, not someone else, not a different unit. a veneer, and i thought i was a good moral soldier, but i was actually helping in change the occupation in that sense. i just want to be clear, are you saying that the very act of going into the house of an innocent palestinian family, to you, was and is totally unacceptable, and corrosive, and doing serious damage to the sort of moral values of israel's army and, indeed, the nation state? or are you saying that that's just the tip of an iceberg of behaviour, much of which is much worse than that? yeah, i would say that when you look at the past 50 years, entering the 51st year,

look at the past 13 years that we've been collecting testimonies from soldiers, and you have different kinds of testimonies. so like the straw widow that i just talked about, i could talk about the flying checkpoint or entering houses for searching, or checkpoints, or making our presence felt, instilling fear into the palestinian population. or the actual order‘s war, instilling a sense that they're being chased, showing there's a new sheriff in town. there's a constant system... it's the imposition of a basic power dynamic. the message being, "we're in control, we're in charge of you and your lives, and we, in essence, can do what we want." that's true. and i would say, in that, you have mundane routine operations ofjust having... you know, standing in a checkpoint, or walking through a city centre or village, and you can have cases in this military occupation of violence, destruction of poverty, of humiliations of palestinians. we've collected dozens

of these testimonies. that's not the problem of occupation, it's a symptom. the problem is the idea of controlling millions of people by force indefinitely. and that's where the state of israel is going. that's where the government is actually taking us, and indefinite military occupation. but this, in the end, what you're outlining as your critique of what is happening in israel, and that the idf as the agent of occupation is doing is essentially political. i mean, you're saying, if i understand you correctly, that the very act and policy of occupation is corroding israel's value and must end. but the truth is, time after time, after time, the israeli public votes in elections for parties which sustain and believe in that occupation. that's true, but when you look at this democracy, it's basically a democracy that is controlling and ruling millions of people that don't have a right or say in that democracy. so between the river and the seat,

you have about 13 million people, where half of them do not go and elect anyone. so a big part of our mission, and that's where we spend, as breaking the silence, the vast majority of our energy and time, speaking to our fellow citizens. all across israel, we're actually the leading organisation in the anti—occupation camp in the sheer numbers of people that we meet. but we also recognise that the houses that we entered were not houses of israelis, and the occupation is not an internal israeli issue, it's an issue that affects millions of palestinians. and obviously, the international community is involved as will. and i want to come back to the politics of this in some detail, butjust to stick, for now, with testimony, because breaking the silence is all about gathering together the voices of soldiers, former soldiers, who are no longer prepared to be silent about what they've seen. i just want you to be very clear with me about some of the other

behaviours, because you've talked about the day—to—day goal routines