Right, so you finish your shift at an Israeli army base near Beersheba. You go back to the barracks, take your boots off, and there’s a mouse in the room you’re meant to sleep in. Welcome to life on the edge of the biblical plague of Israel – rodents, rodents everywhere. Givati Brigade soldiers say this is what was happening at their own headquarters in Sde Teiman. The Israeli army has an occupation problem inside its own HQ if you like – how quaint for them. And when the soldiers asked for help, guess who ended up paying for the traps?

It started in the offices apparently, one of the soldiers put the first sightings about eight months earlier though. A mouse getting at somebody’s lunch is the sort of thing you might tell your mates about. Then she said they were chewing through documents. Then the electrical cables. At some point you’d think an officer might ask why the local wildlife had been allowed to take over the rewiring and where were they all coming from?

By this soldier’s account, the brigade had been split across different sites. She and the others still working at headquarters felt nobody was properly looking after the place. She described rubbish lying about and pigeon droppings all over the base, so it seems no prizes for what was attracting them. There were still people coming in every day to do their jobs, in a building somebody was supposed to be keeping fit to work in ,all in an area already known to be affected by rodent problems believed to be linked to turning the Gaza Strip into a rats paradise as Israel has been doing through genocide for more than three years now. Well I suppose as long as the mice were in the offices, your Israeli soldier could at least shut the door at the end of their shift and go back to their room and forget about it.