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”.
I corrected myself. You are not a minority in the world, as I don’t know the numbers and there are clearly a lot of sympathizers of the Palestinian cause in England, Spain, France and the US. I don’t even know what is going on in the rest of the world.
I can only empathize with the writer’s original emotion of feeling like a persecuted minority.
EDIT I retract my use of the word “Persecuted”. At best, this is lack of tolerance.