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

 News|Israel-Palestine conflict

‘I was a human shield’: What Israeli

 soldiers did to a Gaza father

Yousef al-Masri spent several terrifying days forced to clear roomfor

 heavily armed Israeli soldiers.

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.

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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 read more