A reserve soldier present at the site of a building collapse which left 21 IDF soldiers dead has said that if the soldiers had acted according to protocol, 14 of them would still be alive.
"On the face of things, this activity should have been simple," Ynet journalist Yossi Yehoshua quoted the reservist as saying. "You go in, conquer the homes, check that there are no explosives in them, tunnel shafts, etc. and then the force arrives to place explosives in it. During this time the conquering force exits, and the moment they finish the entire force retreats and it detonates."
"What happened here, essentially, was that the force which conquered the home remained inside. The operation had been fast and good, and everything went perfectly. These are soldiers who have done this dozens and maybe even hundreds of times in the past. In this case the antitank cell arrived and that was surprising, because it wasn't reasonable that at a distance of less than a thousand meters from the fence, there would be active cells.
"If they had acted according to the protocols, 14 fighters would have been saved. The tank force could not have been saved, but anyone who wasn't supposed to be in the building would have been saved. These operations happen on a daily basis and we must not allow such a thing to repeat itself ever again. So many soldiers at a scene with explosives is in contradiction to the safety protocols.
The disaster led to the deaths of 21 soldiers, and initial findings show that the forces placed explosives in homes about 600 meters from the border with Israel, with the intention of demolishing the structures.
Nineteen of the soldiers who were killed were spread out in two buildings during an advanced stage of the operation, just prior to the detonation.
Engineering forces were booby trapping ten two-story buildings located a little more than half a kilometer from the Gazan side of the border as others were securing the activity. At around 4:00 p.m., a terrorist approached the scene after coming out of a tunnel shaft and fired an RPG type missile at a tank that secured the operation. Two soldiers were killed and two were wounded.
At the same time, an anti-tank missile was fired at two buildings where dozens of soldiers were staying. According to estimates, the explosion of the missile in the buildings caused the trap to explode and the buildings to collapse on the soldiers.