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”.

  • Shardikprime@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    20
    arrow-down
    33
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.