“They let the dog on my husband as the soldier kicked the door down”
A six-member family who escaped their neighborhood near the Shifa Hospital in Gaza City which has been besieged by the Israeli army since 18 March provide testimony of what happened to them.
“Al Shifa Complex – we nearly all died there,” grunted the man.
“We saw death over six days while we were besieged, the quadcopter, the tanks…” the mother carrying her baby said.
“I call on the world to look at the Shifa and the displaced people who are there, there is no one left there, everybody is under the wreckage and rubble,” another young man says.
“We were not in Shifa, we were in our house [next to it], but everything just crumbled down on us and that goes for everyone else, the neighborhood just fell on people,” the mother added.
“The children are being executed in front of their parents – the executions are being done openly in front of their other siblings and mothers…” said the young man.
“They put youngsters in front of their tanks and run over them,” added the mom.
‘They set the dog on my old husband’
One old who escaped her house near Al Shifa Complex also spoke of terrible things being done by the Israeli soldiers to civilians.
“We live 50 meters away from the Al Shifa Hospital Complex, what we saw and heard was gun fire raining down on us, torrid rain but bullets.
The soldiers came searching all the flats in the buildings and when the reached our apartment, the soldier kicked the door down with his foot and entered and let the police dog in who immediately leaped on my husband…
He was in the middle of the room and the dog started to bite him all over, his chest, stomach and badly bit his leg which started to bleed profusely, losing about more than a kilo of blood which I saw…we were not able to do anything for him nor provide first aid care.
I also so old ladies in the storerooms [at the bottom of the building] that were dead with their luggage next to them. And elsewhere in the neighborhood I saw people dead that had been run over by tanks….”
Subsequently the Israeli army bulldozed all the apartment buildings around the Al Shifa Complex and set the flats on fire so their owners can’t return to them.
Marwan Asmar is a writer based in Amman specializing on Middle East Affairs.
