“One of the soldiers said I looked like his nephew and that this nephew was killed in front of his grandmother who was taken hostage by Hamas and that the soldiers will slaughter us all,”
Those who dared to leave their homes for whatever vital errand were shot down in the streets by snipers.
“They made us empty out our bags on the floor and blocked us from picking up our money or our wives’ gold,” Nader recalls. “What little food we had, they also threw away. They took our money, IDs and phones.”
The men and teenage boys were taken to a warehouse where they sat on a bare floor covered in scattered grains of rice. There they were beaten, interrogated and verbally abused. There was no sleep, and the grains of rice cut their skin as they sat there, undressed.