The call to Mahmoud Shaheen came at dawn. It was Thursday, October 19th around 06:30, and Israel was bombing Gaza for the 12th day in a row. Mahmoud was in his three-room apartment on the third floor in al-Zahra, a middle-class area in the north of the Gaza Strip. Until then, that part of the city was mostly untouched by airstrikes.
He heard an increasing commotion outside. People were screaming. “We need to escape,” shouted someone on the street, “they will bomb the towers.” As he left his building and crossed the road, looking for a safe place, his phone lit up.
It was a call from a private number. “I’m calling you from Israeli intelligence,” said the man on the line. That call lasted more than an hour – and it was the scariest call of his life. A voice spoke to Mahmoud saying his full name and speaking in flawless Arabic. “He told me he wanted to bomb the three towers… and ordered me to evacuate the area.”
The area – north of the Wadi Gaza River, the point from which Israel has ordered civilians to move south since the early days of the war – consisted of modern apartment blocks, as well as shops, cafes, universities, schools, and parks. People started gathering in those parks. Mahmoud could not understand why his neighborhood had become a target. “I did my best to stop him. I asked, ‘Why do you want to bomb us?’ “He replied, ‘There are some things we see that you don’t’.”
He did not explain what he meant. “It’s an order from people bigger than you and me, and we have an order to bomb,” the voice added, Mahmoud says.
His phone soon rang again. Another man was on the line. The voice said they realized Mahmoud was a “wise man” after the events of that morning, which is why they decided to call him again. The man introduced himself as Daoud.
Mahmoud was disturbed by the level of detail the man had about his life – the familiar way the man addressed him and mentioned his son’s name. According to Mahmoud’s story, this man then tried to explain what was happening in Gaza. “He started saying to me: ‘Did you see how Hamas slaughtered the children with knives?’…”I told him that it is forbidden according to our Islamic faith,” Mahmoud recalls. He urged the voice not to go for “mass punishment”, but Mahmoud knew it was hopeless.
Mahmoud says the man told him that more buildings would be destroyed that night and that the dentist would have to order the neighbors to evacuate once again. He was initially told that the targets were two buildings in addition to the three that had been destroyed that morning, as well as another block of towers.
But the change in orders came suddenly. They would bomb an entire block of flats on the east side of the street, Mahmoud recalls being told.
Thanks to Mahmoud’s efforts, it is believed that none of his neighbors died that day. But his report reveals the panic and anguish of the Palestinian community as they watched their homes and everything they loved being destroyed around them, Federalna reports.
