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.
“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.