On October 19, hundreds of displaced Palestinians in northern Gaza’s Hamad School in Beit Lahiya heard what everyone in the Palestinian enclave dreads, Al Jazeera reports.

“At dawn, we heard [Israeli] tanks encircling the school, and quadcopters overhead began ordering everyone to get out,” said Amal al-Masri, who had given birth to her youngest daughter so recently she had not named her yet when the tanks came.

“Buildings were being shelled all around us,” Amal told Al Jazeera. She lived in a ground-floor classroom with her husband Yousef, their five young children — all aged between four and 11 — and Yousef’s 62-year-old father Jamil.

A quadcopter shot at the buildings and dropped sound bombs, sending people into a panic as they rushed to gather whatever they could. Some fled with nothing.

Yousef and other males aged more than 14 years, including some he recognised from nearby schools, were ordered by Israeli soldiers to gather at the main gate in groups, line up and approach an inspection passage with a camera, known as “al-Halaba”.

“The realisation that I was being used as a human shield was terrifying,” Yousef said.

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