Gaza City – On October 19, hundreds of displaced Palestinians in northern Gaza’s Hamad School in Beit Lahiya heard what everyone in the Palestinian enclave dreads.
“At dawn, we heard [Israeli] tanks encircling the school, and quadcopters overhead began ordering everyone to get out,” Amal al-Masri, 30, who had given birth to her youngest daughter so recently she had not named her yet when the tanks came, recalled.
People were already tense after shelling and explosions throughout the night – the adults too scared to sleep, the children crying in fear and confusion.
“Buildings were being shelled all around us,” said Amal, who lived in a ground- floor classroom with her husband Yousef, 36, their five young children – Tala, Honda, Assad, and Omar, all aged between four and 11, and Yousef’s 62-year-old father Jamil.
Amal had cradled the baby while Yousef held two of their youngest children. Together, the adults had prayed.
Now, it was dawn, and a recording of a male voice speaking in Arabic played through loudspeakers on a quadcopter circling over the school, ordering everyone to come out with their IDs and hands up.
The quadcopter shot at the buildings and dropped sound bombs, sending people into a panic as they rushed to gather whatever they could. Some fled with nothing.
Yousef, Amal and the children were among the first to get to the schoolyard – Yousef and the four children held up their IDs and their hands, while Amal held the baby in her arms.
In the chaos, Yousef lost track of his father.
“The quadcopters instructed: ‘Men to the school gate, women and children in the schoolyard,’” Amal recalled.
The pit
“There were soldiers at the school gate with tanks behind them, and more soldiers surrounding the place,” Yousef said.
He and other males aged more than 14 years, including some he recognised from nearby schools, were ordered by Israeli soldiers to gather at the main gate in groups, line up and approach an inspection passage with a camera, known as “al-Halaba”.
“Each man was ordered to approach a board with a camera on it, one by one,” explains Yousef, who thinks the camera used facial recognition technology.
After being registered by the camera, the man or boy was sent to a pit dug by Israeli bulldozers, he says.
Over the next few hours, some males were released, others were sent to another pit, while some were interrogated.
As for Yousef, he knelt with about 100 other men in a pit near the school with his hands behind his back all day.
“The soldiers were shooting, throwing sound bombs, beating some of the men, torturing others,” he said. Throughout, he worried about his family.
“I was deeply worried about my wife and children. I didn’t know anything about them,” Yousef recounted. “My wife had given birth a week ago and she wouldn’t be able to walk with the children. Without anyone to help, I was afraid of what might happen to them.”
When evening came, there were only about seven men left in the pit.
Yousef was hungry, tired and worried, then a soldier pointed at him. “He randomly chose me and two other men; we didn’t understand why,” Yousef told Al Jazeera.
“The soldiers took us to an apartment in a nearby building,” he said, adding that he thinks they were near the Sheikh Zayed roundabout.
The men were forbidden from speaking to each other, but Yousef had recognised them – a 58-year-old and a 20-year-old who were sheltering in schools near Hamad. Throughout, he said, the sound of shelling and bombing echoed around them.
“A soldier told us we’d be helping them with some missions and would be released after, but I was afraid they’d kill us at any moment,” Yousef said.
‘Using me for cover’
Yousef and his exhausted fellow captives dozed off at some point in the night, before being jolted awake by the soldiers and pushed out of the apartment and into the streets.
He soon realised that the soldiers were walking behind him, to use him as cover.
“The realisation that I was being used as a human shield was terrifying.”
When they reached a school that had been emptied by Israeli soldiers, he was ordered to open doors and go into each classroom to check for fighters who might be hidden there.
The heavily armed soldiers would only enter after his “all clear”.
The day continued that way, with Yousef being used to “clear” room after room, after which the soldiers would set the buildings on fire.
The whole time, Yousef feared a quadcopter would shoot him, or an Israeli sniper might mistake him for a threat and kill him.
When the day’s searches were complete, he was brought back to the apartment with the two other men and given the second meal of the day, a piece of bread and some water, just like the morning.
On the fourth day, Yousef and the 58-year-old man were ordered to go to a nearby school and the Kamal Adwan Hospital to deliver evacuation leaflets to people sheltering there.
They were given an hour and told that a quadcopter would be hovering overhead. As they handed the leaflets to people, quadcopters were announcing the evacuation over loudspeakers.
Escape
Yousef decided he would try to escape that day by hiding in the hospital courtyard.
“I was afraid to go back,” he explained. “I wanted to escape and find out if my family was safe, as I had overheard soldiers instructing women and children to head south to Khan Younis.”
He decided to get in a line of men being forced to evacuate, waiting anxiously as time dragged on. The soldiers had said they should only be gone for an hour, and it had been several.
The line of men was advancing. “I was praying they wouldn’t recognise me,” Yousef said.
Then a soldier sitting atop a tank shot him in the left leg.
“I fell to the ground. The men around tried to help me, but the soldiers shouted at them to leave me,” Yousef recalls.
“I clung to one of the men, then a soldier said to me, scolding: ‘Come on, get up and lean on this man and head to Salah al-Din Street.’”
Despite the pain as he hobbled away, Yousef was in disbelief that the soldier had not killed him. “I expected to be killed at any moment,” he said.
A little further on, he was taken by a Palestinian ambulance to al-Ahli Arab Hospital for treatment.
Reuniting
Amal, who had taken the children to the New Gaza School in al-Nasr in the west of Gaza City, heard one day that Yousef was at al-Ahli Hospital.
She rushed there, relieved after having suffered through days of conflicting reports as some people said they saw him detained, while others said they had seen him elsewhere.
She had barely made it to al-Nasr, she told Al Jazeera over the phone.
On the day the family was separated, she says, the women and children were kept in the schoolyard for hours.
“My children were terrified. Many kids were crying. Some were asking for food, water. Mothers pleaded with soldiers for food and water, but they just yelled at us and refused.”
In the afternoon, the Israeli soldiers moved the women and children to a checkpoint with a camera.
“They told us to walk out five at a time,” Amal said, describing how her 11-year-old daughter Tala was held back to join the group after her.
“She started crying and calling, ‘Mama, please don’t leave me,’” Amal recounts, her voice shaking.
They were eventually told to walk south on Salah al-Din Street.
“The tanks surrounding the school were overwhelming – I thought to myself: ‘God! A whole brigade of tanks has come for these defenceless civilians.’
“My body was exhausted – I had given birth only a week earlier, and I could barely carry my baby, much less the few belongings we had.”
As tanks rumbled around them, they kicked up waves of dust and sand. “With all the dust, I stumbled, and my baby girl fell from my arms onto the ground,” Amal recalls, telling how she screamed and the older children cried when the baby fell.
Eventually, she left all their belongings on the road; she was too weary to keep carrying them. She needed to get her children somewhere safe.
“My four-year-old son didn’t stop crying: ‘I’m tired, I can’t do it.’ We had no food, no water, nothing.”
Early in the evening, she reached New Gaza School with other displaced people from the north.
Amal, Yousef, and their children are together now, in a classroom at the school.
Yousef spent two days in the hospital and, after 13 stitches, walks cautiously with a limp.
Yousef’s father Jamil has been missing since the day the soldiers came to Hamad School. He heard from some people that his father had been taken prisoner, but he does not know.
Their baby daughter, unnamed when they were forced to leave northern Gaza, has been named Sumoud, “steadfastness”, a symbol of their refusal to leave.
