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”.
How does blowing up someone’s home “get rid” of hamas?
He said, while doing the mental gymnastics to avoid remembering that Hamas does in fact use civilians buildings and the civilians inside as a human shields for his own subterranean tunnels under said civilians buildings.
Hundreds, possibly thousands of homes might have fighters underneath them. So they level square blocks to get to them. If only they had the best intelligence system in the world and could zero in on them.