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”.
This is the thing that gets me - what would you do if someone barricaded themselves inside a house next door, kept taking pot shots and you and stealing people off the street? I would shoot back.
That analogy breaks down when you’re the guy that locked them in the house.
Until you realise you locked them in the house after them and their friends tried to take your back yard when you were having a domestic with your partner, and a founding part of their cult is that you need to die.
(Hamas not cult, just analogy)
Israel is literally the one stealing backyards, and when it can’t, it bombs them.
Not just the backyards, but the front and side yards too
Nah if we’re gonna continue this analogy, it’s like if you come across a village of 50 people then force everyone into one house so you can have your friends move into the other houses. Then 1 of those 50 starts shooting at you. So then you drop a grenade in the house, kill a bunch of their kids and shoot their dog.
And would kill 10 innocents in the house just to get to that one guy?
Honestly, probably.
So how are you any better than the terrorist you condemn, by openly admitting you are ready to shoot 10 civilians? At what number of civilians do you make the cut 20, 50, 100, 500, 1000?