- written by, Alice Cuddy
- Title, BBC News
- Where he reported Jerusalem
The sun had just risen when Mahmoud Shaheen’s phone rang.
It was around 06:30 on Thursday 19 October, and Israel had been bombing Gaza non-stop for 12 days.
At that time, Mahmoud was in his apartment in Al-Zahraa, a middle-class neighborhood in the northern Gaza Strip. The neighborhood has been largely unaffected by airstrikes so far.
He heard a noise coming from outside. People were screaming. Someone in the street was shouting: “You have to run, they will bomb the buildings.”
When he left his house and crossed the road in search of a safe place, Mahmoud’s phone started ringing.
He was calling a private number.
According to Mahmoud, a man said: “I am calling from Israeli intelligence.”
The conversation, which lasted more than an hour, turned into the scariest phone call of his life.
“We’ll bomb three buildings.”
The caller addressed Mahmoud by his full name and spoke fluent Arabic.
He added, “He told me that he wanted to bomb three buildings… and ordered me to evacuate the area.”
The building he lived in was not directly threatened, but Mahmoud was suddenly responsible for the evacuation of hundreds of people.
“People’s lives were in my hands.”
Mahmoud quickly recovered and asked the man, who identified himself as Abu Khaled, not to hang up the phone.
Mahmoud (40 years old), a dentist, says he does not know why he was chosen for this mission, but he did everything in his power to ensure the safety of everyone in his neighborhood that day.
Guided by the voices of people on the phone who know how to reach him even when his phone’s battery is dead, he begs for the bombing to stop and screams until his voice turns hoarse so that people flee the area.
Mahmoud led a mass evacuation and then watched his neighborhood disappear before his eyes.
Mahmoud Shaheen, whose phone suddenly rang, led a mass evacuation of his neighbors
After the attack launched by Hamas on October 7, Israeli bombing of Gaza continued.
The Israeli military allegedly sometimes warns Gazans by phone before airstrikes.
The BBC contacted Mahmoud after people we met in the Zahraa neighborhood told him about him.
We cannot verify the content of the phone calls described by Mahmoud.
But the details match posts from that day in a Facebook group and satellite images before and after the bombing.
We know that hundreds of people were left homeless on the day the Israeli army bombed at least 25 residential buildings containing hundreds of apartments and destroyed the entire neighborhood.
The neighborhood’s residents were forced to flee with what few possessions they could, and they later dispersed throughout Gaza.
The Israeli army says it struck military targets and that its actions were subject to “the relevant provisions of international law.”
“Fire a warning shot to prove this is real.”
Mahmoud says that at first he did not believe what the person speaking on the phone was saying.
People around him thought the call might be fake.
Mahmoud asked the person on the phone to fire a warning shot to prove that he was real. He thought that those still sleeping in their homes would hear the sound of bullets and come out.
Then a warning shot, possibly fired from a drone, hit one of the threatened apartment buildings.
“I asked him to fire another warning shot before the bombing,” Mahmoud recalls.
Then another explosion was heard.
Convinced that the call was real, Mahmoud asked the person he spoke to to be patient and not attack people as they left the area.
Mahmoud says that the person on the phone told him that he would give him as much time as he wanted, and that he did not want anyone to die.
After that, Mahmoud says, the rush began to remove everyone in the area from the neighborhood.
Hundreds of people took to the streets. People were running screaming through the usually quiet neighborhood.
In recent days and weeks, Israel has issued warnings to residents of the northern Gaza Valley to leave their neighborhoods and head south.
In the Al-Zahraa neighborhood where Mahmoud lives, there are modern residential buildings, in addition to shops, cafes, universities, schools and public parks.
People gathered in the park after the evacuation order was issued in Zahraa.
During the phone call, Mahmoud asked the caller: Why do you want to bomb this place? When he asked, he was told: There are things that we see that you do not see, and this is an order from me and from someone who is greater than you.
When the areas surrounding the buildings were evacuated, the person on the phone informed Mahmoud that the bombing would begin.
Mahmoud saw three buildings adjacent to his apartment building. One of them was bombed.
According to Mahmoud, during the demolition of the building, the person on the phone said: “This is the building we want, stay away.”
Then two other buildings next to it were hit.
Footage taken that morning in Zahraa shows the ruins at the site of these three residential buildings.
The video clip shows people watching the scene in shock after the attack.
A post on the area’s Facebook group at 08:28 local time said the three buildings were “completely destroyed.”
When the bombing stopped, Mahmoud remembers that the person on the phone said: “We are done… You can come back.”
Mahmoud says he cannot understand what he witnessed. He had been living in this neighborhood of Gaza for 15 years, running a busy dental clinic and raising his children.
Mahmoud describes the phone conversation as follows:
“I told him that Zahraa is a civilian area. No one is a stranger here… I tried to make him understand that. This is not a border area, and we have never had any conflict before.”
After the incident, those whose buildings remained intact returned to their homes.
Missed call from a private number
A few hours later, Mahmoud looked at his phone again and saw a missed call from a private number.
“I knew immediately there would be another evacuation order and bombing, but I didn’t know what the target was. I thought it might be my house or the house next door to me.”
His phone rang again and it was another person named David.
Mahmoud was concerned about the level of detail Dawoud had about his life. He even knows his son’s name.
David began to explain what happened in Gaza:
“Did you see how Hamas slaughtered these children with knives?”
Mahmoud replied: I said this is forbidden in Islam.
The person who spoke on the phone said there would be another attack that night and the neighborhood should be evacuated.
There were common areas in the middle of the apartment buildings
Dawud said the initial targets were two residential buildings adjacent to the three buildings that were demolished that morning, in addition to a new residential building.
Mahmoud revived his neighborhood again.
At the same time, electricity was cut off in Madinat Al-Zahraa. Many people were using the light on their phones in the dark.
Abdullah Al-Khatib, a resident of the neighborhood, says: “We felt completely terrified, and we did not know where to go. We fled without taking anything.”
While people were getting into their cars and driving away, Mahmoud was trying to delay the attack as much as possible.
Three buildings were bombed. As Mahmoud watched the devastation, the man said on the phone that three more buildings would be bombed, and then people would be allowed to return.
But suddenly there was a change in orders.
Mahmoud remembers being told that they would bomb all the residential buildings on the eastern side of the street.
This means the destruction of more than 20 buildings and hundreds of apartments.
Mahmoud said that people were still inside their homes because there was no warning for those buildings and asked for a deadline until the morning.
The person who spoke on the phone, who claimed to be named Daoud, said, “The order has been issued and we will bomb all the buildings within two hours.”
Mahmoud shouted and asked those around him to evacuate the area.
In the following minutes, chaos erupted in the neighborhood.
An old disabled woman lives in an apartment building. Mahmoud and those around him asked the group to “drive like crazy” to reach him and get him out.
Mahmoud was also concerned about the nearby nursing home, but the person on the phone said: “The house will just be demolished.”
Mahmoud says that he and his neighbors did not witness a small bombing that night, but rather witnessed the destruction of residential buildings one by one.
A post on the Facebook group at 21:11 local time said: “Al-Zahraa buildings are being bombed now. May God help us.”
Mahmoud then asked the person on the phone where he could take his neighbors.
It was decided that the area surrounding Palestine University would be safe.
Mahmoud hung up the phone, then a neighbor’s phone rang
Mahmoud says people were waiting at the university in fear, listening to the sounds of explosions outside.
The dogs were in the street trying to find a place to stand among the women and children in fear.
Mahmoud says he turned off the phone for a while to avoid running out of battery, but he received several calls in the following hours.
According to Mahmoud, they were told which building would be bombed each time.
At one point, his neighbor’s phone rang and the caller asked to speak to Mahmoud.
“The bombing is still continuing,” a post on the Facebook group said at 08:53 local time.
Some people spent the night near Palestine University
Mahmoud continued talking to the person on the phone until the streets became quiet.
Then the calls stopped without any further instructions being given to the people of Zahraa.
“They did not ask us to return to our homes, evacuate, or leave the area,” Mahmoud says. “So people waited until noon and then started moving.”
In the following hours and days, the Al-Zahraa neighborhood dispersed, as is the case in many areas of Gaza.
Mahmoud says: “Even for those whose homes were not destroyed, there are no longer any services… The sewage networks are broken, there are no bakeries, no supermarket, no water, and no electricity.”
source, Qutaiba Kulthum/Getty Images
al Zahraa district
Although Mahmoud’s house was severely damaged, it was not destroyed.
However, the neighborhood where he lived and built his business for 15 years no longer exists.
Mahmoud says he moved his family to another part of Gaza, where they stayed in a friend’s crowded house.
Israel allegedly warned Gazans before their attacks by calling, texting, and distributing leaflets.
But in some cases, civilians say they were not warned in advance.
In response to BBC questions, the Israeli army said that it “targeted military points in the Gaza Strip as part of its mission to eliminate the Hamas terrorist organization.”
It said that attacks against military targets are subject to “relevant provisions of international law, including measures to limit civilian casualties.”
The statement said: “Hamas continues to attack Israel from the entire Gaza Strip. Hamas is entrenched in civilian infrastructure and operates throughout the Gaza Strip. We are determined to stop these attacks, and therefore, if necessary, we will strike Hamas.”
According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, more than 10,000 people have been killed in Gaza since October 7. It is reported that more than a third of them are children.
It is believed that thanks to Mahmoud’s efforts, none of his neighbors died that day.
But his novel reveals the state of panic and pain that the Palestinian community is experiencing as they watch their homes and everything they love explode around them.
The BBC spoke to many families who live in Al-Zahraa, where businessmen and entrepreneurs live, where families eat falafel and pizza together on the beach and children play football in the early morning hours with the call to prayer heard from the rooftops.
In the second part of this news, we will tell the stories of the people of Al-Zahra.
Moaz Al-Khatib and Dima Al-Babli from the BBC Arabic service also contributed to the preparation of this report.
Images created by Mike Hills.
The videos are verified by Shayan Sardarizadeh.
The story was edited by Samuel Horty.