Commander of the Central Command, Major General Yehuda Fuchs said Wednesday that the two officers apparently shot each other when they attempted to catch infiltrators smuggling weapons from the Nabi Musa training base in the Jordan Valley in which the incident took place. Night vision equipment was stolen from the troops inside the base while they were on a training exercise. The officers led a patrol around the base in an attempt top recover the stolen equipment. The two groups were uncoordinated and without helmets, vests or radios which may have contributed to the deadly confusion. One patrol consisted of three company commanders and a soldier, while the second was an officer acting alone.

As they were walking, the team with the two officers spotted a suspicious figure walking about 200 meters away on a mound, flanked him until they were just several meters away, and yelled at him in Arabic to halt.The suspewct was, in fact, another IDF officer. The lone officer  the two officers, misidentifying them as possible terrorists and fatally wounded them. Despite being only 10 to 15 meters away from each other and all being equipped with noight vision, they did not recognize that they were all from the same unit.