'I’m calling from Israeli intelligence. We have the order to bomb. You have two hours'
'I’m calling from Israeli intelligence. We have the order to bomb. You have two hours'
An extraordinary warning call to a Palestinian dentist starts the panicked evacuation of a Gazan neighbourhood.
By Alice Cuddy BBC News, Jerusalem
The call to Mahmoud Shaheen came at dawn.
It was Thursday 19 October at about 06:30, and Israel had been bombing Gaza for 12 days straight.
He'd been in his third-floor, three-bedroom flat in al-Zahra, a middle-class area in the north of the Gaza Strip. Until now, it had been largely untouched by air strikes.
He'd heard a rising clamour outside. People were screaming. "You need to escape," somebody in the street shouted, "because they will bomb the towers".
Everytime I read an article like this, my immediate reaction is posting a comment expressing my disgust with the Israeli State's actions and everytime I hesitate because I don't want to suffer the inevitable wave of people defending the Israeli State's actions as somehow justifiable because Hamas did something vile first.
It's a continuing cycle of violence and the Israeli State holds a humongous power advantage. They don't use that power disparity to deescalate and integrate the Palestinian people to prevent Hamas from having support. Instead they do shit like this where they drive Palestinians straight into Hamas' hands, because the Palestinian people are given no other option to turn to.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Directed by the voices of strangers, who always seemed to know how to reach him even when his battery ran out, he pleaded for the bombing to stop and screamed until his throat hurt for people to run away.
Since the war had begun, messages had been circulating in the community Facebook group warning of hoax calls and offering tips on identifying real Israeli evacuation orders.
The area - just north of the Wadi Gaza river, a point that Israel has been ordering civilians to move south of since the early days of the war - was made up of modern blocks of flats as well as shops, cafes, universities, schools, and parks.
Mahmoud led the crowd, which included not just residents of the tower blocks, but also other displaced people who had sought shelter in al-Zahra after fleeing their own homes elsewhere in northern Gaza.
Mahmoud had been keeping his distance from his wife and five children all day - both because he was busy evacuating people and because he feared that his contact with Israeli intelligence made him a target.
Strikes on military targets were subject, it said, to "relevant provisions of international law, including the taking of feasible precautions to mitigate civilian casualties".
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Hamas sets up military operations in a civilian building by force - the civilians have no say in this and get killed if they protest
Hamas then uses that building to launch rockets, store ammunition, communication stations How does Israel proceed to neutralize those sites? what they do is:
“Roof knocking”: Hitting the building’s roof with a small explosive to announce that it will fall in 15 minutes
(see video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teevWpXlRZY example)
Automatic SMS and phone calls impacted areas warning and urging to evacuate
Precision strikes that make the building fall vertically with minimal damage to the areas
As a result, civilians (and potentially military personnel) are given a chance to evacuate while ammunition stashes, rocket launching stations etc stay in the building and are destroyed.
Weirdly enough, since the operation began, Hamas has repeatedly instructed Palestinians to ignore these warnings.
To be honest, I’m shocked those protocols are still used after Hamas’s attack. I would absolutely not be surprised of these measures stopped.
Incredibly, people don’t care that during a war, Israel is bending over backwards to minimize human suffering while fighting a decades long war against people who are deliberately hell-bent on genocide of the Jews of the world.