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”.
I just want to ask also, how do you stop more Hamas by killing people? You don’t. The Hydra effect will guarantee that any one terrorist killed will breed two more. Yesterday my partner looked at me and said, “If Israel had killed my entire family, I would probably join Hamas”, and he’s an atheist and a Brit who learned most of what he learned about Hamas this year.
What Israel is doing is creating more opportunities for massacre in the future. I am not sure why, but I’m convinced there is a genocidal agenda here.