Gaza City – On October 19th, hundreds of displaced people at Hamad School in northern Gaza heard what everyone in the Palestinian Enclave is afraid of.
“I heard it at dawn [Israeli] Overhead tanks and quadcopters surrounding the school, we began to order them all to come out,” recalled Amal al-Masri, who recently gave birth to a daughter (he hadn’t named her yet when the tanks came recently).
People were already nervous after artillery and explosions all night. Adults are so scared to sleep that children cry in fear and confusion.
“The buildings were being fired around us,” Amal said. Amal lived in a classroom on the ground floor with five young children, Tara, Honda, Assad and Omar, five young children, between four and 11 years old, and his 62-year-old father, Jamil.
Amal was holding the baby, while Yousef was holding the two youngest children. Together, the adults prayed.
Now it was dawn, and a recording of a male voice spoken in Arabic played through speakers on a quadcopter swirling the school, ordering everyone to raise their ID and hands.
The quadcopters fired the buildings, dropped sound bombs, and quickly panicked to gather as much as they could. Some people didn’t run away.
Yousef, Amal and the children first arrived at the schoolyard. Yousef and the four children raised their IDs and hands, and Amal held the baby in his arms.
In Chaos, Yousef lost his father’s pursuit.
“The Quadcopter directed “the school gates, men to the men and children,” recalls Amal.
pit
“There were soldiers at the gates of the school, there were tanks behind them, and there were more soldiers surrounding the place,” Yousef said.
He and the man over the age of 14 were ordered to gather in groups at the main gate by Israeli soldiers, including those recognized by nearby schools, and approach the inspection corridor with a camera known as “Al-Haraba.”
“Each man was ordered to approach the board where one camera was placed,” explains Yousef, who believes the cameras use facial recognition technology.
After being registered on camera, the man or boy was sent to a pit that was dug by an Israeli bulldozer, he says.
Over the next few hours, some men were released and others were sent to another pit, but some were interrogated.
As for Yousef, he had kneeled with about 100 other men in a hole near the school, his hands behind his back all day.
“The soldiers were shooting, throwing audio bombs, beating some people, torture others,” he said. Overall, he worried about his family.
“I was deeply concerned about my wife and children. I didn’t know anything about them,” Yousef said. “My wife had given birth a week ago, but she couldn’t walk with her kids. If no one helped me, I was afraid of what would happen to them.”
When the evening arrived, there were only about seven people left in the pit.
Yousef was hungry, tired and worried, so the soldier pointed at him. “He randomly chose me and the other two men. I didn’t know why,” Yousef told Al Jazeera.
“The soldiers took us to an apartment in a nearby building,” he said, adding that he thinks they are near Sheikh Zayed’s roundabout.
Men were forbidden to talk to each other, but Yousef recognized them. The children, ages 58 and 20, were evacuated to a school near Hamad. Throughout, he said, the sounds of artillery and bombing echoed around them.
“The soldiers said we’d help them on some missions and then they’d be released, but I was worried that they would kill us anytime,” Yousef said.
“Use me for the cover.”
Yousef and his exhausted fellow prisoners fell asleep at some point in the night. He then woke up by the soldiers and pushed him out of his apartment onto the street.
He soon realized that the soldiers were walking behind him and using him as a cover.
“The realization that I was being used as a human shield was horrifying.”
When they arrived at a school empty by Israeli soldiers, he was ordered to enter each classroom to check for fighters that may be hidden there.
Heavyly armed soldiers will only enter after his “all clearness.”
The day continued as such, Yousef was used to “clear” the room after the room, and then the soldiers placed the building on fire.
Yousef was always afraid that the quadcopter would shoot him, or that an Israeli sniper might mistake him for a threat and kill him.
Once the search for the day was completed, he was brought back to the apartment with two other men and was given bread and water as in the morning.
On the fourth day, Yousef and the 58-year-old man were ordered to go to a nearby school and Kamal Adwan Hospital, delivering evacuation leaflets to those evacuating there.
They were given an hour and were told that a quadcopter was hovering overhead. When they handed the leaflets to people, Quadcopters had announced evacuations to the speakers.
run away
Yousef decides to hide in the hospital courtyard and try to escape from the day.
“I was scared to go back,” he explained. “I wanted to get away and see if the family was safe, because the soldiers were listening instructing women and children to head south.”
He waited worried that it would take some time and decided to enter the line of men who were forced to evacuate. The soldiers said they had to go only for an hour, and that was a few.
The men’s lines were moving forward. “I prayed they wouldn’t recognize me,” Yousef said.
A soldier sitting on the tank then shot him with his left leg.
“I fell to the ground. The men around me tried to help me, but the soldiers cried out to them to leave,” Yousef recalls.
“I clung to one of the men and the soldier said to me.
Despite the pain he stepped in, Yousef had a distrust that the soldiers hadn’t killed him. “I expected to be killed anytime,” he said.
A little more, he was taken to an Al-Ara Arab hospital for treatment by a Palestinian ambulance.
Reunion
Amal, who was taking his child to Al Nasr’s new Gaza school west of Gaza city, heard one day Yousef was at the Al-Ahli hospital.
She rushed there, and after suffering from days of conflicting reporting, she felt relieved.
She had barely reached Al Nasr, she told Al Jazeera over the phone.
On the day the family parted ways, she says the women and children were kept in the schoolyard for hours.
“My children were scared. Many were crying. Some were seeking food, water. My mother pleaded with the soldiers for food and water, but they cried out at us and refused.”
In the afternoon, Israeli soldiers moved women and children to checkpoints on camera.
“They told us to come out five at a time,” Amal said.
“She started crying and began to call out, ‘Mama, don’t leave me,'” Amal says, her voice shaking.
They were eventually told to walk south on Sarah Al Din Street.
“The tanks surrounding the school were overwhelming. I thought to myself. For these unprotected civilians, an entire brigade of tanks came.
“My body was exhausted. I had given birth just a week ago. I was barely able to carry my baby.
They kicked waves of dust and sand as the tanks cried out around them. “In all the dust, I stumbled, my baby girl fell from my arm to the ground,” Amal recalled, her screaming as the older children cried out as the baby fell.
In the end, she left all her belongings on the road. She was too tired to continue carrying them. She needed to make the kids safe somewhere.
“My 4-year-old son didn’t stop crying. ‘I’m tired, I can’t.’ There was no food, no water or anything. ”
Early in the evening she arrived at the new Gaza School with other displaced people from the north.
Amal, Yousef, and their kids are together now in school classrooms.
Yousef spends two days in the hospital, 13 needles and walks carefully, limp.
Yousef’s father, Jamil, has been missing since the day the soldier came to Hamad School. He hears from some people that his father was taken to prisoners, but he doesn’t know.
Their baby daughters were unknown when they were forced to leave North Gaza and were named “Fudo”, a symbol of their departure.
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