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More than 60 Israeli soldiers who took part in last summer's war in Gaza have offered first-hand combat stories. Many said they felt their orders went too far, leading to indiscriminate fire and Palestinian civilian deaths.

The testimonials were gathered by Breaking the Silence, an Israeli group made up of former soldiers. The group has gathered similar material in the wake of previous Israeli combat operations over the past decade.

The intense fighting in Gaza lasted 50 days last summer, and by the end, more than 2,200 Palestinians were killed, many of them civilians, along with more than 70 Israelis, mostly soldiers.

The militant Islamist group Hamas fired rockets into Israeli cities and towns and the Israelis carried out an air and ground campaign that devastated many parts of the small, congested coastal territory.

Israeli political and military leaders say Israeli forces did everything they could to avoid hitting Palestinian civilians, but faced an enemy that operated among Palestinians civilians and intentionally directed fire at Israeli civilians.

However, the Israeli soldiers who spoke to Breaking the Silence tell a different story.

An Israeli soldier says troops were given vague orders, which led to indiscriminate firing in the 2014 war against Hamas in Gaza. The Israeli group Breaking the Silence collected the testimonials, but obscured the faces of the soldiers.

One young Israeli sergeant who spoke with Breaking the Silence also spoke with NPR. He said he was a tank gunner in the central Gaza Strip. He was surprised when his commander said anything within 200 yards was fair game to shoot.

"I remember (I) stood up in front of this commander and told him, 'Is it real?' It's so weird for me. It's so vague. It's so ... I don't know, you can do whatever you want? And he said, 'Yes,'" the sergeant recalls.

One day he was told to pick a target, any target, and fire a tank shell at it in memory of a fellow Israeli soldier who had been killed. He said he and others played a game trying to hit moving cars along a main north-south road in Gaza. He admitted it's fun to fire a tank.

"I can destroy buildings and I'm only 21," he says. But he also noted this attitude wasn't what he had learned during previous military service in the West Bank or on Israel's northern border with Lebanon.

"There is a good reason, of course, to protect soldiers' lives," he says. "So you need to shoot and you can't now try to discuss rules of engagement. But I think the commanders just let loose, let's do whatever we want, it's our time to shine, it's the war we were prepared for. And everything is fine in war. I think it's their excuse, in my mind."

Avner Gvaryahu, who directs public outreach in Israel for Breaking the Silence, says the organization double checks every story, but hides soldiers identity for their protection. He also says the aim is to not point fingers at individuals.

"It is so easy to find a scapegoat, so easy to say that a specific person is the problem. There definitely are specific actions, but it goes all the way to the top," he says.

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Palestinian children stand in a heavily damaged school in Gaza City on Aug. 5, 2014. Many civilian buildings were damaged and many Palestinian civilians were killed in the 50 days of fighting. Mohammed Abed /AFP/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Mohammed Abed /AFP/Getty Images

Palestinian children stand in a heavily damaged school in Gaza City on Aug. 5, 2014. Many civilian buildings were damaged and many Palestinian civilians were killed in the 50 days of fighting.

Mohammed Abed /AFP/Getty Images

Israeli military spokesperson Peter Lerner says one of the biggest challenges the military faces is operating in an urban environment, where militants shoot rockets from residential areas. He questions why Breaking the Silence didn't first share its stories with the military before going public.

"They've been building this file for months and months now," Lerner says. "Clearly we need to be looking at certain things there, but they haven't conveyed those to us, so it raises questions about what is the intent behind this entire report."

The military is carrying out its own investigations into allegations of improper actions by soldiers, some brought to prosecutors' attention by soldiers who fought in Gaza last summer.

Lerner says Breaking the Silence has a political motive. The group says its intent is to reveal what soldiers are actually do on the ground.

One soldier, whose voice was distorted to hide his identity in a video released by the group, said his unit tried to use up all its machine gun ammunition just before getting resupplied. It didn't matter whether targets had been identified.

"We just kept shooting and shooting, almost nonstop, until the barrel was overheated," he says. "When it does, it's no longer useable. But we didn't really care, because we knew that no one would ask questions. If anyone did, we could say, 'Well, it was for the sake of the operation. It didn't happen on purpose.'"

In other stories released by Breaking the Silence, soldiers claim two women were killed because they looked suspicious using cell phones. An old man was wounded then covered in dirt by a bulldozer because soldiers say they feared he might have a grenade. Several soldiers who told their stories to Breaking the Silence said they did so because their friends and families didn't want to hear.

Israel

Gaza

When Cici Xu isn't working as an accountant, she's driving around Shanghai picking up passengers for People's Uber, the American company's nonprofit, ride-sharing service that operates in nine mainland Chinese cities.

Xu, 40, makes about $1,300 a month as a driver, but says she doesn't really do it for the money.

"I hope to meet different people," she says, explaining her new hobby at a downtown caf recently. She wants to "make life more colorful and get to know a different Shanghai. I've now discovered, I'm addicted to this work."

As NPR's Shanghai correspondent, I've been doing something similar since last year: giving free rides in a rental car so I can talk with passengers and get a sense of real life in China. It's for a series called "Streets of Shanghai."

I feel my life now is very rich. I used to dread long holidays. I would be very scared of them, because I would feel very lonely. But now, I'm not afraid.

- Cici Xu, accountant and Uber driver

This year, I finally bought a car. While waiting for delivery, I started taking Uber. Since then, Yang Zhuo, NPR's news assistant, and I have spoken with more than People's Uber drivers.

Unlike in the U.S., most here say the main reason they drive is social. They want to chat with all sorts of people and — like Xu — try to make sense of this mega-city of 24 million.

My Uber drivers have included a young airline pilot who picked me up at home one morning in his Land Rover. He said he spent all his time in the cockpit, so driving for Uber was his only way to talk to passengers of any kind.

A retired factory worker picked me up another day and took me to a Starbucks. He said he was just looking for stimulating conversation and almost forgot to register the ride, adding that he didn't care if he got paid.

In China, this is a big change. As recently as the 1990s, most people didn't own cars and giving someone a lift meant putting them on the back of your bicycle.

'Many, Many People Are Very Kind-Hearted'

For Cici Xu, the Uber-driving accountant, the last two years have been tough. She was diagnosed with breast cancer and got divorced from her husband, a police officer, after discovering romantic text messages from other women on his phone. She also suffered from insomnia.

Cici says chatting with customers has been a catharsis. Recently, she had a heart-to-heart with a passenger, who was also divorced, and later called, offering Cici medication to help her sleep. Gestures like this are rare among strangers in big Chinese cities, where deceit is not uncommon and distrust is often the default mode.

"Sometimes customers help us," says Cici, "other times, we help customers. Uber provided us with this kind of platform, although it's not what they had in mind."

For many, Uber cars serve as rolling neighborhood pubs, minus the alcohol. That people drive this city looking for human connection is at odds with a common criticism of urban Chinese: that many only care about money and care nothing for strangers. Before Cici started driving, she had the same impression.

"But after I became an Uber driver," she says, "I actually feel many, many people are very kind-hearted."

Cici no longer sits at home, stewing. Driving has become her social outlet and escape.

"I feel my life now is very rich," she says. "I used to dread long holidays. I would be very scared of them, because I would feel very lonely. But now, I'm not afraid."

Escape From The 'Tepid Water' Of Life

Joel Xu, 25, started driving for Uber because he was bored with his job as an auto engineer. Like Cici, Joel (who is not related) has found driving liberating, but in a completely different way.

Leaving his engineering work took guts. His parents pulled strings to get him hired. His mom, who works at a state-run bank, oversaw everything, including his bank cards and salary.

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"All the money at the household is controlled by her," Joel says over coffee one morning. "When I need money, I have to ask my mother."

"I told her she's violating my rights. Then, my mom said, 'Even your job is arranged by me, so your money is mine!'"

This conversation is unthinkable for most American milennials, but in China, it's not unheard of. Chinese parents generally have much more control over the lives of their adult children and — like Joel — many children live at home until they marry.

Joel's parents were furious when he quit his engineering job. They grew up in the 1960s and 1970s when Mao Zedong ruled and China was still genuinely Communist. Joel says his folks value stability and conformity.

To illustrate, Joel describes a recent Chinese road movie called The Continent. Two disaffected guys leave a lonely island where they grew up and drive across China. In one scene, one of the men tosses frogs in a wok as an experiment. As the heat rises, the frogs scramble to escape.

"Frogs won't allow themselves to be trapped," says the man.

"This is the reality," says the other man, as he slams a lid down on the frogs.

"I'm that frog," says Joel. "Our jobs are like this tepid water. After a while, we don't want to jump out."

"But some frogs do want to escape," he adds. "Then, someone slams the lid down. For me, that's my parents."

But, Joel says, since he started driving for Uber, things have changed. He makes nearly $4,000 a month, thanks to the generous subsidies Uber provides drivers. That's more than three times what he made as a low-level engineer and a lot more than either of his parents earn.

Joel has his own bank card now, so his Uber salary comes directly to him. He says his parents are impressed with his paycheck, and the three get along these days.

"They rarely get angry with me now," Joel says. "I am certainly much more independent. The more money I make, the more say I probably have at home."

People's Uber is not popular with everyone in Shanghai. Government-owned cab companies hate the competition and local officials have impounded Uber cars and fined drivers.

It's part of a broader crackdown on private car-hailing services, which are dominated by the Chinese apps, Didi Dache and Kuadi Dache.

Uber, however, says China's central government seems to like car-hailing apps and it's confident about the service's staying power.

Cici, the divorced accountant, hopes Uber is right, because she doesn't know what she would do without it.

"If Shanghai stops allowing us to use the Uber platform, I'll feel very unhappy," Cici says. "It will change my life."

Yang Zhuo contributed to this report.

Shanghai

China

Sunday night's Mad Men was the antepenultimate episode of the series – a word we don't get to use enough, but one that can be surprisingly significant in television. The second to last episode is often (rightly or wrongly) understood and analyzed as finale table-setting, so this third to last episode is sometimes the last that feels like the regular show. And for Mad Men, it seemed to serve as a crystallizing hour for the themes that the show has returned to over and over, reaching no conclusions about those themes but turning them over and over in its narrative hands.

The show's main fascination, of course, is change: whether it's possible, what it does to people, and who pays the price for it. This episode is called "Lost Horizon," named after what's often spoken of as the first mass-market paperback book. That's entirely consistent with where social and personal change has been going all season: what is distinguished and highly valued by the people who have always had power is being forcibly democratized, made vulgar and accessible, made cheap and audacious.

"Lost Horizon" followed the former SCDP personnel as the company they built together was dismantled and they were absorbed, for however long they choose to stay, by McCann Erickson, the new owners who care not at all if most of them stay or go. Don pressed his hand against the glass windows of his new office – a tantalizing nut for those who have always believed the series would end with him becoming the window-jumper in the credits. (He also hungrily watched a plane – incidentally a tantalizing nut for a handful of particularly inventive viewers who have advanced the adorably bonkers theory that Don will become D.B. Cooper.) Miserable and lost in the new company among a sea of identical men with identical pens and robbed of his personal exceptionalism, he took off in search of Diana, the waitress with whom he was involved earlier this season. When he didn't find her in Racine, Wisconsin, he kept driving. Not back home, but farther west. (This exclamation point on the episode's ending may be lost on a certain number of coastal Mad Men viewers who have no idea where Wisconsin and Minnesota are relative to each other and don't realize Don is gone, baby, gone.)

For now, McCann Erickson boss Jim Hobart is without the one SCDP asset he seems to have valued: Don Draper. And Don Draper – who after all, is not Don Draper anyway – spent the episode playing with one of his favorite cerebral toys: the endless promise inherent in simply ceasing to exist. He didn't have to come up with the elaborate ruse he did to explain himself to Diana's ex-husband's new wife; he likes inventing a new back story on the fly. He likes thinking that perhaps an identity can be left behind like a suit and a new one carried like another man's business card.

That window, that plane: he already had one foot out the door. We never even saw the new apartment Meredith was decorating for him. He didn't even seem to care what it looked like, though he was amused by pointing at a photo, choosing dcor by placing himself in a new home of his imagination. But did he ever intend to live there? His office is gone. His apartment is gone. What's left that he really would miss? Oh, right. He paused for a lovely little chat with Betty, to make sure she was okay and she could look after the kids. After all, as Betty reminded him, Sally is very independent now. He even wished her well. "Knock 'em dead, Birdie." And ... gone.

Meanwhile, Joan learned the perhaps unsurprising news that her painful decision to sleep with a client in return for a partnership didn't provide her with lasting protection against jerks, but only with opportunities to meet more of them, who got worse the higher up she went in the organization. She began with Dennis, the rude, sexist, leering clod assigned to work with her on her accounts. When he blew a client call and then whined that she wasn't "fun" the way he expected, she went up one level to Ferg Donnelly to ask for someone else to deal with. She was told that Ferg would help and protect her – if she slept with him, of course. And when she went over Ferg's head to Jim Hobart, he told her flat-out that her partnership didn't count, she didn't matter, she could count on worse treatment as time went on, and she was welcome to leave, with only half the money the company owed her, if she didn't want to hang around and be sexually harassed and humiliated. In a very real way, she was offered $250,000 to stay and be abused. Or, looked at another way, offered the opportunity to purchase her freedom for the same amount.

The final insult? Roger Sterling, whom she has loved and been disappointed by over and over, came to tell her to give up, take half her money, eat the loss, and leave. Christina Hendricks did beautiful work in that scene as Joan looked at Roger and saw all the years she'd lost to a job that — and a man who — ultimately gave her back nothing close to what she knew she deserved. So she walked. The system stayed, but at least this one woman left.

Joan is in a peculiarly brutal moment that arrives in lots of lives: the moment when the anesthesia of low expectations for your life has worn off and allowed in the pain of the unjust impediments to getting what you are finally prepared to admit you want. She now knows she settled for too little from Roger, from SCDP, from her life as part of the brain trust behind a successful advertising agency. She, who began the series by schooling Peggy in how things are, now can't stand how things are. She believed that by going along one last time to get her partnership, she'd be insulated from the effects of all of this, and now she knows there's no insulation thick enough to keep Dennis and Ferg and Hobart away. She learned that you can't build yourself a lifeboat and escape a sexist swamp all alone. Because you're still in a very little boat in a very big swamp.

Peggy, meanwhile, got what very might be the single greatest character shot in Mad Men's seven-season history: walking into McCann Erickson for the first time in dark sunglasses with a cigarette hanging out of her half-smiling mouth, a dirty painting under her arm, and no time for nonsense. We already know from Joan's discussion with Ferg, as well as from how long it took them to even get Peggy an office, that Peggy isn't going to be treated well at McCann either. They don't intend to give her the authority she had at SCDP. They don't intend to make men work for her the way men used to work for her. This isn't going to be what she wants – at least not at first.

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John Slattery as Roger Sterling and Elisabeth Moss as Peggy Olson. Justina Mintz/AMC hide caption

itoggle caption Justina Mintz/AMC

John Slattery as Roger Sterling and Elisabeth Moss as Peggy Olson.

Justina Mintz/AMC

But Peggy had a great day. Peggy spent a day drinking and roller-skating while Roger played the organ (one of my favorite sequences either actor has ever done), and they talked more than they usually have, and it helped.

Perhaps part of the reason Peggy is feeling better than Joan despite knowing her prospects are dim is that she's never let herself accept the way things were, so she's been feeling this rock in her shoe forever. She feels it when she comes to work, when she goes home from work, when she talks to Don, and when she talks to Joan. She's been working in spite of it. Peggy always believed she could do more. She asked for more money. She even left for more money. She told Don Draper, of whom most of the office was afraid, how to treat her and how not to. When McCann told her to come and sit with the secretaries until she had an office, she said no: she understood the optics. She understands she has to hold out as long as possible, in absolutely every way she can, even though it probably won't work.

Nothing is good. Everything is terrible. What's not cheap and loud is old and rotting. But for whatever reason, other than a man who's literally fleeing into the west, Peggy Olson is the only one who feels all right.

An estimated 14,000 were injured in April's earthquake in Nepal. The caseload is overwhelming hospitals in Kathmandu, says Dr. Bianca Grecu-Jacobs, a resident in emergency medicine from California who was working in Nepal when the quake struck.

"[In] the lobby areas, patients just are on the floor waiting," Grecu-Jacobs says via Skype from Katmandu. "They strung up IVs for patients who need them in whatever manner they can."

Grecu-Jacobs is now helping out in a hospital with logistics, working on sanitation and trying to prevent infections. The day of the earthquake, she says, she had been enjoying a bit of a holiday, mountain biking with colleagues. Suddenly, everything changed.

"We felt it," she tells NPR's Rachel Martin. "The first thing that we noticed was a house: One of the walls had just fallen down in a huge cloud of dust. It was almost like an explosion happened."

Interview Highlights

Hospitals' biggest problems

With those crowded conditions also come concerns with sanitation and infections. Many patients have open wounds that are now being exposed to other patients with similar conditions, dirt. People ... weren't able to be properly cared for quite some time before getting to a hospital. So cleanliness is also an issue, along with space.

Many locations have power

The infrastructure in Kathmandu prior to the quake was not wonderful, so actually many homes, hotels, hospitals actually have their own independent power supplies. There are solar powers all over the city. Many places have generators.

The challenge of homeless patients

The hospital is also struggling with where to discharge patients. Even patients who otherwise don't need the hospital have nowhere to go. They have no home; they have no clean environment, so even if they have wounds that could be cared for at home, the concern is that if there's no home, how will they care for those wounds? Will they just come back again with another infection?