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In the early hours of Wednesday morning, a building damaged by Israeli strikes collapsed in Gaza, killing at least 21 people, including 11 children.
An estimated 100 people were living in the six-story building when it collapsed as residents were sleeping. Rescue teams worked to pull out dozens of people from the rubble in the hours that followed, their work made more difficult due to the lack of much-needed equipment.
Wednesday’s collapse is a reminder of the unliveable conditions in Gaza, in particular the lack of safe housing and absence of a rebuilding process amid Israel’s genocide. Though the collapsed building had previously been damaged by Israeli bombing, displaced families had moved in due to the lack of available options for shelter.
Gaza’s Civil Defense warned that 2,000 damaged buildings are currently sheltering people across Gaza, in unsafe conditions, due to a lack of safe alternatives.
“The building collapse in Gaza should be enough of a wake-up call for the international community to pressure Israel to allow reconstruction materials and caravans into Gaza,” Euro-Med Monitor stated on X. “Displaced Palestinians need safe places to live, and they need them now.”
Since the start of the genocide, approximately 1.9 million Palestinians in Gaza, or around 90 percent of Gaza’s population, have been displaced – many of them multiple times.
In August, the United Nations stated that approximately 82 percent of structures in Gaza – about 200,000 buildings – have been damaged, with two thirds of them completely destroyed. They added that the destruction of buildings has increased by nearly 10 percent since the so-called ceasefire began in October 2025. Since then, global attention and pressure on Israel has waned, even as the genocide has continued and conditions of life in Gaza have further deteriorated.
Since 2023, Israel has imposed a near-total blockade on the entry of heavy machinery needed to clear wreckage and rescue people trapped under buildings Israel has bombed. As a result, the Palestinian Civil Defense has estimated that there are over 8,000 people who remain unrecovered from destroyed buildings. Despite the so-called ceasefire in October 2025, Israeli officials have still refused to allow the entry of necessary rescue equipment.
No reconstruction work has taken place in Gaza. President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace has conditioned rebuilding and reconstruction on the disarmament of Hamas – which Hamas agreed to in July, on the condition that Israel halts its attacks on Gaza.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration approved one of the largest military aid packages to Israel on Tuesday, a $2.8 billion sale of heavy weapons including 20,000 BLU-117 bombs, 20,000 MK-84 bombs, and 20,000 bunker-busting I-2000 warheads – heavy munitions that are designed to destroy buildings and that have left thousands of deep craters across Gaza.
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