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”.
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Directed by the voices of strangers, who always seemed to know how to reach him even when his battery ran out, he pleaded for the bombing to stop and screamed until his throat hurt for people to run away.
Since the war had begun, messages had been circulating in the community Facebook group warning of hoax calls and offering tips on identifying real Israeli evacuation orders.
The area - just north of the Wadi Gaza river, a point that Israel has been ordering civilians to move south of since the early days of the war - was made up of modern blocks of flats as well as shops, cafes, universities, schools, and parks.
Mahmoud led the crowd, which included not just residents of the tower blocks, but also other displaced people who had sought shelter in al-Zahra after fleeing their own homes elsewhere in northern Gaza.
Mahmoud had been keeping his distance from his wife and five children all day - both because he was busy evacuating people and because he feared that his contact with Israeli intelligence made him a target.
Strikes on military targets were subject, it said, to “relevant provisions of international law, including the taking of feasible precautions to mitigate civilian casualties”.
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