Meters away from Egypt’s border with the city of Rafah in southern Gaza stands Mahmoud Ahmad, whose real name has been altered at his request. Mahmoud asks passers-by about a place where he can find shelter for himself and his family, who were recently displaced from Gaza City. With a yellowed face and a hesitant voice emanating from his frail body, the weary-eyed young man tells me how his family of six arrived in Rafah on foot.
Mahmoud’s testimony is a direct refutation of the Israeli propaganda claims that the army is not forcibly displacing people from their homes. Mahmoud and his family live west of Gaza City near the Ansar area, where the Israeli army invaded last week. They had originally sought refuge at a shelter east of Gaza City in the Daraj neighborhood, but after the withdrawal of the Israeli army from Western Gaza, they returned to their home there. In Gaza, the Israeli army calls inhabitants according to their area of residence.
“The occupation would call us on our phones and order us to go to specific locations within Gaza City,” Mahmoud tells breaking news. “They would call someone in Ansar [west of Gaza City] and tell them to go to north of Gaza. Then, when we reached a shelter in al-Daraj [in the north]we got another call telling us to evacuate back to the West.”
“In this way, they force us to go from one place to another,” he continues. “They cause chaos, and then we get caught in the middle.”
Mahmoud and his family lived through “days of death,” as he says. These were days when he wasn’t sure what his family’s fate would be — whether they would be buried under the rubble and left to be eaten by animals, arrested and tortured like so many others, or simply executed by gunfire.
When the family returned to their neighborhood near the coast in al-Ansar, where the army had withdrawn, they spent several days in their old apartment building, which had miraculously survived the urban decimation. Several families occupied the building, but during the day, all the occupants would gather in a single apartment and share resources while planning for what might come next. They wondered what they might do if the army invaded again.
A little over a week ago, the occupation re-invaded the Ansar and Abu Mazen Circle areas. This time, the area was full of people, and six shelter-schools teemed with displaced persons, each shelter housing between 200-300 families.
“On the first day of the [second] invasion, we heard strange and terrifying sounds,” Mahmoud says. “Sounds of tanks and armored troop carriers. In Gaza, we’re now able to distinguish between the sounds of a moving tank and a personnel carrier, which make different noises and move at different speeds.”
Mahmoud says that from 5:00 a.m. in the morning until dawn, these vehicles did not stop their incursion into the area.
“We could hear the soldiers speaking loudly in Hebrew, and none of the people living in the building dared look out the window to see what was happening, but we all knew that they were preparing for a wider invasion of the area,” he continues.
“On the second day, those six UNRWA schools were surrounded by the army vehicles, and then we heard a military vehicle call out through a megaphone in Arabic, ordering people to leave the schools and move to a place that had been prepared for them. They then ordered men and women to separate, dividing each of them into age groups and isolating them from one another.”
Mahmoud says that during the invasion, the machine guns never stopped. “They were firing at people and over their heads and beneath their feet,” he says. “And they killed a large number of people, we couldn’t count how many. But the sound never stopped. It didn’t stop from the vehicles or from the soldiers shooting with their rifles.”
“In addition, quadcopter drones hovered over our building,” he adds. “We could see their shadows, but we kept away from the windows, fearing that they would spot us and open fire.”
Up until that moment, the military operation continued outside Mahmoud’s building, making them believe that they would be safe so long as they remained inside and that the Israeli soldiers would not enter their homes. By the end of the day, Mahmoud says they could hear the sound of an explosion right below the building. The soldiers had entered the tower, blowing up the external garage door as well as the door to the building. All the families had gathered in one apartment beforehand, but now they all rushed to their respective apartments and locked their doors behind them. But their efforts were ultimately pointless.
“We were on the fifth floor,” Mahmoud relates. “And we could hear through the stairwell that the soldiers were going from apartment to apartment, banging on the door with their boots, and when there wasn’t an answer, they would blow the door up.”
“We were yelling as they got closer, telling them that we are civilians,” Mahmoud continues. “We told them, ‘We don’t have any weapons. We don’t have anything that can hurt you.’”
No one responded to them until the soldiers reached their apartment. Mahmoud’s family raised their hands, holding pieces of white cloth and their ID cards in either hand. They looked into the soldiers’ eyes and kept repeating that they were civilians and that they demanded safe passage, as they had just been following army directions and moving to designated safe zones.
None of their entreaties worked. Within seconds, everyone was blindfolded and bound with their hands behind their backs and made to face the wall.
“We weren’t expecting to leave our house alive,” Mahmoud says.
A home with an interrogation room
Mahmoud tells breaking news that the army gathered everyone in the building on the fourth floor, separating women and children from the men, and placing each group in a room. Then, the soldiers set up a third room — for interrogation.
They interrogated each person individually, searching their cell phones and electronic devices for information. Anyone whose phone contained videos of the October 7 events or videos published by the resistance factions showing the targeting of soldiers and tanks was arrested on the spot. Mahmoud says that his brother Ahmad was arrested due to such photos that were downloaded to his device.
The family still does not know what happened to Ahmad from this moment on. They have contacted the International Committee of the Red Cross several times but have not received any information yet.
I asked for a photo of Ahmad, in the hopes of being able to find him, but Mahmoud refused outright, fearing for the safety of his brother and believing that if a relative of Ahmad were seen speaking to the media, there would be a reprisal from the Israeli authorities against Ahmad.
When Mahmoud was interrogated, the army asked him questions in Arabic about ties to Hamas — whether he was a Hamas member, whether he knew any members, or whether he knew if any of his neighbors were from Hamas.
Mahmoud points out that he does not have relatives in Gaza. All his uncles and extended family live abroad in the Gulf and elsewhere, and his family and his brother’s family are the only ones to have remained. They both work remotely for companies in Saudi Arabia, Mahmoud as an accountant, and his brother as a programmer.
“Neither of us have had any ties to any military activity,” he says.
He adds that the field interrogators played “good cop, bad cop.” One officer would pretend to sympathize with him and look out for his interests, while the other was harsh and would assault everyone he interrogated, sometimes physically.
The ethnic cleansing of the Ansar area
After the interrogations had concluded, the soldiers ordered everyone to go down to the first floor. They didn’t allow them to take anything with them — no food, no clothes, no electronics, no money or wallets.
“They forced me out of my house barefoot and blindfolded and kept screaming at me the entire time,” Mahmoud continues. “No one allowed me even to pick up my shoes from my apartment. They would only scream at me, some in Hebrew, some in Arabic, some in English, and they would order me to keep walking and be quiet, threatening that the next time I ask for something they will kill me. That’s what the soldiers told everyone.”
On the ground floor, they were handed over to a group of other soldiers, who were far more harsh and brutal than the group that had interrogated them. These soldiers constantly physically assaulted them, beating them while shouting and cursing and firing live bullets above their heads and at their feet, and no one was allowed to even look at a soldier.
“If someone were to so much as stare at a soldier, they would have been killed,” Mahmoud intimates, saying that the soldiers were deliberately trying to terrorize them.
While the Israeli media and statements by Israeli officials claim that Israel will not forcibly displace Palestinian civilians in Gaza, Mahmoud’s account indicates the opposite. As the soldiers were hurling their abuse at them, they ordered them to head south on foot.
“When we reached the street, we were shocked by the massive number of soldiers filling the area,” Mahmoud continues. “They were spreading out everywhere, between the buildings, surrounding schools, entering houses. There were so many of them, and the sight was terrifying.”
That’s when the soldiers corralled them alongside all the other displaced people who had been rounded up from the neighboring shelters and ordered all of them to march south.
“They said, ‘you must all go south using the sea road,’ which is al-Rashid Street,” Mahmoud recounts.
That’s when they joined the throngs on the long march south, repeating the scenes of their ancestors during the Nakba of 1948.
The Ansar area used to be a security zone belonging to Hamas and was used by the movement to train its fighters. It was also the location of a central prison and the police academy. This will all no doubt be used as a pretext to claim that it continued to be a Hamas stronghold and thus necessitated this brazen act of ethnic cleansing. But the reality is that all Hamas operatives retreated into the tunnels at the outset of the war, and the only people left in the area were civilians.
The claims by the Israeli media, and even American media and officials, that the north would slowly be repopulated and that civilians would be allowed to return have been thoroughly belied by the ethnic cleansing of the Ansar area.