Gaza rescuers end search after a war-damaged block kills 21

Palestinian Civil Defence teams closed the search on Thursday at a multi-storey building in Gaza City that collapsed on Wednesday. Twenty-one people were killed. Forty-five were brought out alive. Mahmoud Basal, the service’s spokesman, said eight of the dead were children and that about half the wounded were children too.

More than 110 people had been living in the block. It had already been damaged by an Israeli strike during the war. After the October 2025 ceasefire, reconstruction talks stalled. Families moved back into cracked buildings because tents and overcrowded rooms were the other options. The Gaza Health Ministry gave the same death toll of 21. Um Mohammad Adas, whose relatives were among the dead, said survivors from her family were left on the street with nothing.

Bulldozers worked the site on Thursday to clear ground for tents. Basal said the crews lacked the equipment they needed and still got 45 people to hospital. OCHA recorded collapses at five shelters in the first week of September. The Palestinian Ministry of Public Works said on Wednesday that more than 2,000 additional buildings were at risk.

A ceasefire that did not rebuild

The October ceasefire was sold as the start of reconstruction. Nearly a year later, more than two million people remain squeezed into about a third of the enclave. Makeshift tents and damaged rooms are the housing stock. When a wall gives way, the casualty list looks like a wartime list because the buildings are wartime buildings.

The collapse is not an airstrike. It is what follows when a strike is left in the structure and people move back in. That distinction matters for the record and does not change the deaths. Public Works has a list of 2,000-plus buildings. It does not have the steel, cement and engineering teams to empty them.

Aid agencies have repeated the same warning since winter: unexploded ordnance and unstable slabs will keep killing after the shooting pauses. Five shelter collapses in one week in early September were the preview. Wednesday’s block was the larger event. The search is over. The list of buildings that could go next is not.