I am a lawyer and have my own practice in Gaza City. Like many residents, I was home on 7 October 2023, with my pregnant wife, when we started hearing rockets and bombs. I went out to stock up on food and water right away, and when I came back we stayed home. We were newlyweds. We got married just two months earlier and preferred to stay home.
At the beginning of November, our building was bombed, and I suffered minor burns. We moved to my family’s house, also in the Tell al-Hawa neighborhood, and stayed there for three days. But then the bombings got worse, and we all moved to a-Shifaa Hospital, assuming we would be safe there. Then we moved to an apartment we rented on ‘Omar al-Mukhtar Street. My wife was pregnant and the situation was very difficult.
On Friday, 5 January 2024, at noon, I went to my parents’ house to take my wife’s jewelry and money we left there. I ran into three young guys I didn’t know , and we all went together to look for flour near al-Kuwait Square, east of Tell al-Hawa . Suddenly, at around 1:30 P.M., I heard a shot. It hit one of the guys in the head and he fell to the ground. He was killed.
The other guys and I started running away from there, but then a tank and a military jeep appeared in the street and fired at us. I took a bullet in the leg, below the knee, and another in the lower abdomen. Another guy was killed on the spot. There were two of us left and we managed to get inside the ruins of a bombed building and hide there. I hid behind a concrete pillar, because I couldn’t walk, and the other guy went up to the second floor. The soldiers in the tank started shooting at us, and then they got off it, went up to the second floor and grabbed the other guy. I heard them asking him where I was and then they took him away; I don’t know where. I was left there alone, bleeding, for about four hours.
In the evening, a truck and a tank came and the soldiers in the tank fired in my direction and then about nine soldiers came towards me on foot. One of them, who spoke Arabic, ordered me to get up. I did, but then I fell again. They stripped me naked and took the gold jewelry, my money and my phone. Another soldier came and handed me a phone. I talked to someone who asked me in Arabic which tunnel I’d come out of. I told him I was a civilian and hadn’t come out of any tunnel. Then he told me he would meet me and suggested I didn’t talk to the soldiers in the meantime because they would kill me.
The soldiers blindfolded me with my clothes and tied my hands to the truck, literally hung me off it, and then it drove for a few minutes with my head banging against it. We stopped at a place I didn’t know. One of the soldiers undid the zip ties, and I fell on the ground. He took off my blindfold, and then they took me to a tent where I met a Shin Bet (ISA) officer. He had my ID card and phone. My phone rang, and it was my sister. I asked him to let me talk to her to calm her down and say the army had me, but he refused. He asked me which tunnel I’d come out of, and I told him I was a civilian. The soldiers started beating me hard, and I started bleeding from the gunshot wounds. Then another soldier came and dressed my wounds.
Then they put me in a tank and took me to another place. When I got there, they took me out and laid me down on something foul-smelling for about three minutes. The soldier took my blindfold off, and I saw it was a rotting corpse. Then they took me to another officer, and he also asked me which tunnel I’d come out of. I told him, too, that I was a civilian. The soldiers pointed their guns at me, and I thought they were going to shoot me, so I said the shahada. Then one of them fired a shot on the ground in front of me. They blindfolded me, and I stayed lying outside on gravel, in the cold, until the middle of the night.