Gaza City collapse kills 21 in a war-damaged block that families had moved back into

Search teams in Gaza City ended their work on Thursday at a seven-storey building that came down on Wednesday. Twenty-one people were killed, the Hamas-run Health Ministry and Civil Defence both said. Forty-five were pulled from the rubble and taken to hospitals. Mahmoud Basal, spokesman for the Palestinian Civil Defence Service, told Reuters that eight of the dead were children and that about half the wounded were children as well.

More than 110 people had been living in the block. It had already been damaged in the war that ended, on paper, with an October 2025 ceasefire. Families moved back in because they had nowhere else that was dry. Bulldozers spent Thursday clearing rubble so tents could go up for the survivors.

One relative, named El-Ejlah in the Reuters account, said his family used the damaged building because no other shelter was on offer. He said other blocks in the city are in the same condition. "Unless a solution is found to provide displaced people with new shelters, the collapse would not be the last," he said.

The numbers behind one building

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said five shelters collapsed in the first week of September. That category covers both standalone houses and units inside larger blocks. The Palestinian Ministry of Public Works said on Wednesday that more than 2,000 additional buildings remain at risk.

The Norwegian Refugee Council, in a 16 September note, said hundreds of damaged buildings already assessed as unsafe are still occupied. Israel had approved 36,960 pieces of timber and 660 emergency shelter kits in August, then rejected the shipment on 26 August and again on 2 September, according to the UN humanitarian situation report dated 11 September. The load was framing timber and basic tools for emergency repairs.

The UN Humanitarian Coordinator on 16 September asked for rescue equipment, machinery, engine oil and fuel to be allowed in, along with shelter material, inside four weeks. That request sat on the table while the Gaza City block came down.

Why reconstruction never started

The October 2025 ceasefire was sold as the start of rebuilding. Talks then stalled. Israel has kept a reconstruction freeze in place until Hamas disarms, a condition Hamas has not met. A Palestinian technocratic administration tasked with replacing Hamas inside Gaza has listed 71 rehabilitation projects for its first six months. Almost none of that list has turned into poured concrete.

More than two million people are confined to about a third of the enclave, most of them in tents or in rooms inside damaged buildings. Winter is the next deadline. The Shelter Cluster's August report, based on 1,951 household interviews in North Gaza, Gaza City, Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis between 14 and 28 June, described families already exposed on all sides: heat, rain, and walls that no engineer would sign off.

Basal told Reuters his crews lacked the equipment they needed and still got 45 people out. That sentence is the operational fact. The policy fact sits next to it. Timber that was approved in August was turned around at the crossing. Two thousand buildings are on a risk list. One of them has now fallen, and the tents going up on its footprint are the reconstruction plan that actually exists.