‘We are next’: Gaza families living in homes they know could collapse

Hana Salah Palestinian journalist

AT AROUND 2.30 AM on Wednesday, 16 September, cracks began spreading through Al-Saada, an eight-storey residential building in southern Al-Rimal, western Gaza City.

The building had already been damaged by Israeli bombardment. Yet more than 100 displaced Palestinians were sheltering inside.

The first warning came from the displacement centre next door, whose management alerted Gaza’s Civil Defence to the new cracks. Rescue crews reached the building and began moving people out, evacuating 35 residents and people from nearby tents.

They did not get everyone out.

Al-Saada collapsed with families still inside. When engineer Mahmoud Obeid reached Al-Saada, the scale of the collapse was visible in the distance between what had once been separate floors. In some sections, he said, only around 20 centimetres remained between one concrete slab and the next.

“The floors were on top of each other like biscuits,” he said.

Al-Saada had been known to be dangerous before it fell. Obeid said the building was eight storeys high and that its first three floors had been severely damaged by previous Israeli bombardment. Despite the condition of the structure, displaced families were still living in the floors above, from the fourth floor upwards.

Rescuers could still hear people beneath the wreckage. But without the heavy machinery normally required for such a collapse, reaching them meant working through openings as narrow as 40 centimetres and breaking concrete with hand tools, while trying not to bring more of the structure down on those trapped underneath.

For more than 15 hours, rescue workers searched through floors of concrete that had fallen almost flat onto one another. By the end of the operation, 21 people had been recovered dead and 45 rescued alive.

“There was no alternative,” he told The Journal. “If we had found somewhere, we would have left. We were living with the danger every day.”

When the building came down, al-Sawatri was asleep with his family. He remembers the shaking, then darkness and voices calling for help beneath the concrete. A gap left between the collapsed floors gave his family a way out. “We knew it was dangerous,” he said. “But where could we go?”

Obeid said the dilemma has followed him during visits to damaged homes across Gaza. As part of engineering assessments, he has entered buildings he considered unsafe and urged families to evacuate, only to find residents unwilling to leave.

Many, he said, understand the danger and can see the damage around them, but ask where they are expected to go. After repeated displacement and months in tents or overcrowded shelters, some choose to remain even after being warned that their homes could collapse. 

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The scale of the risk makes those encounters more alarming. Obeid estimated that around 2,000 damaged buildings across Gaza are at risk of collapse.

For Obeid, assessing a building is therefore only part of the problem: engineers can identify a structure as dangerous and recommend evacuation, but they cannot provide the families inside it with another home. “There are no organisation can help homeless families”, he added.

Mahmoud al-Sawatri, who survived the Al-Saada collapse with his family, said they had known the building was dangerous. Specialists had warned them to leave, but for 10 months they searched for somewhere else to live and found nothing.

Two days later, five children were trapped in another damaged home

The collapse of Al-Saada was not an isolated warning.

Two days later, on Friday, 18 September, Gaza’s Civil Defence was called to another damaged home, this time in the al-Sabra neighbourhood in southern Gaza City.

Five children had become trapped on the second floor after the staircase inside their home collapsed in eastern Gaza City, according to the Civil Defence. 

Rescue crews managed to bring the children down safely and moved them and their family out of the house. The family was told not to return.

Civil Defence said the home had previously been hit by Israeli bombardment and was considered unsafe to live in because of the risk of further collapse.

The incident ended without fatalities. But coming just two days after Al-Saada, it illustrated the wider danger facing families who have returned to damaged homes across Gaza: a building does not have to collapse entirely to trap or kill the people living inside it.

Obeid said some of the most dangerous damage may lie beneath buildings that are still standing. Intensive strikes targeting underground infrastructure and tunnel networks, he said, displaced soil beneath parts of Gaza and left some homes visibly leaning. He believes thousands of already damaged buildings have consequently become more vulnerable to collapse — not only from further bombardment, but potentially from heavy rain, flooding or other natural events.

‘We are next’

For Alfat Mohammed, the collapse of Al-Saada was not a distant disaster. It looked frighteningly similar to the danger above her own family.

The 42-year-old has been living for around three months in what remains of her family’s three-storey home in al-Saftawi, northern Gaza, after returning there following repeated displacement.

The house was badly damaged during the war. The upper floors were destroyed, leaving Mohammed and her family living in the remains of the ground floor.

It is not a home they consider safe.

Parts of the ground floor are exposed, with tarpaulin used to cover areas where walls are missing. The family has no proper kitchen and has managed to make only part of the bathroom usable. Rats enter through the damaged sections of the house.

An engineering team that inspected the property as part of an assessment of damaged homes warned the family that the remaining structure was dangerous and could collapse.
Still, they returned.

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Olfat and her family had already been displaced five times. For a period, they stayed at her parents’ home, where more than 60 displaced relatives were crowded together.
Returning to her damaged house meant having some space again, but it also meant accepting a risk she thinks about every night.

She has 17-year-old twins, a boy and a girl. Her husband is currently in Greece, while she remains in Gaza with the children.

She said the family cannot afford to rent another home. Moving into a tent would also mean finding somewhere to put it, at a time when rubble covers much of the available space around them. So the family continues to sleep beneath the damaged structure.

“I wake up screaming,” Mohammed said.

Her fear is greatest at night, when her children are sleeping, and she thinks about what remains above them.

The collapse of Al-Saada intensified that fear.

Mohammed said the upper floors of her own home had collapsed “like a biscuit”, leaving the ground floor where the family now lives. When she heard that another damaged building had come down with families inside, she immediately thought of her own children and home.

“We are next,” she said.

The family’s predicament is not simply that their home is unsafe. They have already been told that it is.

The problem is what comes after that warning.

Olfat has no money for another home. Her parents’ house has already accommodated dozens of displaced relatives. Her family has endured five displacements, and even returning to a tent requires finding safe, clear space on which to put one.

For now, the damaged ground floor remains their home — not because she believes it is safe, but because she has not found somewhere safer for her family to live.