‘I was a human shield’: What Israeli soldiers did to a Gaza father

Gaza City – On October 19, hundreds of displaced Palestinians in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza, heard what the Palestinian enclave residents dread.

“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.

After shelling and explosions throughout the night, the adults were already tense and the children were sobbing in disbelief.

With her husband Yousef, 36, their five young children, Tala, Honda, Assad, and Omar, who are between the ages of four and 11, and Yousef’s 62-year-old father Jamil, they were shelling everything that was in our neighborhood.

Amal had cradled the baby while Yousef held two of their youngest children. The adults had prayed collectively.

A male voice was recorded as dawn came crashing down on a quadcopter as it was circling the school, directing everyone to bring 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 eluded the situation.

The four children held up their IDs and hands while Amal held the baby in her arms as the first three children made their way to the schoolyard.

In the chaos, Yousef lost track of his father.

Men to the school gate, women and children to 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.

Israeli soldiers instructed him and other males over the age of 14 to gather in groups at the main gate, line up, and approach an inspection passage using the camera known as “al-Halaba,” including some he recognized from nearby schools.

Yousef, who believes the camera used facial recognition technology, says, “Every man was given the order to approach a board with a camera on it, one by one.”

After being registered by the camera, the man or boy was sent to a pit dug by Israeli bulldozers, he says.

Some males were freed over the course of the next few hours, others were taken to another pit, and some were questioned.

Yousef, meanwhile, spent the entire day knelting with his hands behind his back in a pit close to the school.

He claimed that the soldiers were pelting others, beating some of the men, and torturing others. He was concerned for his family throughout.

“I was deeply worried about my wife and children. Yousef remarked, “I didn’t know anything about them.” She wouldn’t be able to walk with the children if she had given birth a week ago. Without anyone to help, I was afraid of what might happen to them”.

Only about seven men were left in the pit when the evening arrived.

A soldier pointed at Yousef as he was hungry, famined, and concerned. “He randomly chose me and two other men, we didn’t understand why”, Yousef told Al Jazeera.

He claimed that the soldiers took us to a nearby apartment complex and that they believed they were close to the Sheikh Zayed roundabout.

Yousef recognized the men, both 58 years old and 20 years old, who were sheltered in schools close to Hamad. They were forbidden from speaking to one another. Throughout, he said, the sound of shelling and bombing echoed around them.

A soldier informed us that we would be assisting them with some missions and that we would be released, but Yousef warned that they would kill us right away.

“Being a covert person.”

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.

Soon, he realized the soldiers were using him as cover as they were marching behind him.

It was terrifying to realize that I was being used as a human shield.

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” was over.

The soldiers used Yousef to “clear” room after room before setting 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.

He was returned to the apartment with the two other men after the morning searches had finished, and he was given the second meal of the day, a piece of bread and some water, just like he had always received.

Yousef and the 58-year-old man were instructed to deliver evacuation leaflets to those who were sheltered there on the fourth day. They were then directed to a nearby school and Kamal Adwan Hospital.

They were given an hour and told that a quadcopter would be hovering overhead. Quadcopters were announcing the evacuation over loudspeakers as they handed the leaflets to people.

Escape

Yousef vowed to try to elude the hospital courtyard that day by attempting to hide from the crowd.

“I was afraid to go back”, he explained. I overheard soldiers telling women and children to travel south to Khan Younis, so I wanted to run away and find out if my family was safe.

He made the decision to join the line of men waiting patiently as time passed. The soldiers had said they should only be gone for an hour, and it had been several.

The men’s line was growing. Yousef said, “I was praying they wouldn’t recognize me.”

Then a soldier sitting atop a tank shot him in the left leg.

“I sank to the ground,” I said. Yousef recalls that the soldiers yelled at the men who were trying to assist me when they tried to stop them.

“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. ‘”

Yousef was in shock that the soldier had not killed him despite the pain he experienced as he hobbled away. He said, “I anticipated being killed at any time.”

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, feeling refreshed after going through days of conflicting reports, where some people claimed they saw him taken into custody, while others claimed they had seen him elsewhere.

She called Al Jazeera to tell them that she had hardly ever made it to al-Nasr.

On the day the family was separated, she says, the women and children were kept in the schoolyard for hours.

My kids were terrified, my kids thought. There were many crying children. Some were asking for food, water. Mothers pleaded with soldiers for food and water, but they simply yelled at us and declined.

The women and children were captured on camera as the Israeli soldiers moved them to a checkpoint in the afternoon.

“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 began crying and yelling, “Mama, please don’t leave me,” Amal says, shaking her voice.

On Salah al-Din Street, they were eventually instructed to continue south.

“The tanks surrounding the school were overwhelming – I thought to myself: ‘ God! These defenseless civilians have received a whole army of tanks.

I had just given birth a week earlier, and I was unable to carry my baby, let alone the rest of our belongings.

As tanks rumbled around them, they kicked up waves of dust and sand”. My baby girl fell from my arms onto the ground as a result of my stumbling, according to Mal, who recounts how she screamed and the older children cried as the baby fell.

She eventually abandoned all of their belongings on the road because she was too worn out to continue carrying them. She needed to get her children somewhere safe.

My four-year-old son cried, “I’m tired, I can’t do it,” he said. We were without anything, no water, or food.

Early in the evening, she reached New Gaza School with other displaced people from the north.

In a classroom at the school, Amal, Yousef, and their children are currently interacting.

Yousef spent two days in the hospital, and he still has a limp after receiving 13 stitches. He walks slowly.

Yousef’s father Jamil has been missing since the day the soldiers came to Hamad School. He is unaware that his father has been taken prisoner by some of the people he knows.

Sumoud, the family’s unnamed baby daughter, was given to them as a sign of their refusal to leave northern Gaza.

Source: Aljazeera