The Masharawi home in the Tuffah neighborhood of Gaza City was stuccoed white over concrete and the doorways were framed with faded purple paint. Its two floors lay behind a shoulder-height garden wall graffitied with the Palestinian flag and a yellow Dome of the Rock. Spiky barbed-wire curlicues encircled the cartoon mosque.

Omar Yussef stepped out of the sandy lane where the Suburban was parked. The path to the house led through a tangle of lemon trees that stood twice as high as the wall. The trees gave off a warm citrus scent, as though they’d been boiled for herb tea by the strong sun. The low cooing of doves came soothingly through the heat. In a corner of the garden, there was a shady olive grove and a bulbous clay taboun, where Masharawi’s wife might have been baking on any normal day. A strange silence reached out from the open doors and windows of the house into the thick midday stillness.

A thin, gangly boy in his teens, whose left ear stuck out at ninety degrees to his head, appeared at the door. His eyes stuttered between the foreigners and the floor. Omar Yussef spoke to him first.