War-damaged Gaza City building collapses, killing at least 16 and trapping scores

A residential building in Gaza City that had already been struck earlier in the war collapsed overnight into 16 September, killing at least 16 people and leaving scores under the rubble. Gaza Civil Defence and the Health Ministry gave figures that moved through the day. Reuters first reported 12 dead, including five children, and 14 injured. Later Civil Defence and Al Jazeera put the dead at 20. Zaher al-Wahidi of the Health Ministry said 16 dead included at least 12 women and children. About 100 people were described as missing.

The block is the Al-Saada building in the Al-Rimal neighbourhood. Civil Defence said it had six storeys and four apartments on each floor. Some reports called it seven storeys. It had been hit by Israeli strikes near the start of the war that followed the 7 October 2023 attacks. The structure stayed standing and families moved back in because tents and the remaining housing stock could not absorb them. Hamas’s media office said displaced households had been forced into the building for lack of any other shelter.

Raed al-Dahshan, director of Gaza City Civil Defence, said at least ten families lived there. Crews could still hear voices under the wreckage in the morning. Mahmoud Basal, a Civil Defence spokesman, said teams were digging by hand. There were no excavators on site. He asked for two excavators, a digger and bulldozers, and said work was being done with the Egyptian committee, the International Committee of the Red Cross and Gaza Municipality. Sixteen people had been pulled out alive at one count, ten of them hurt.

Witnesses said the collapse also fell onto tents pitched beside the building. People described waking near 3 a.m. to screaming. A Reuters video showed rescuers trying to free two people from a fallen wall. Basal was filmed carrying a small girl wrapped in a blood-stained scarf.

Civil Defence says about 2,000 damaged buildings across Gaza are still occupied. The agency warned that more of them will fail as winter weather arrives. Israel has said it will not permit reconstruction until Hamas disarms. A ceasefire arrangement has not produced a housing programme that would empty the wrecked stock. Alessandro Mrakic, who heads the UN Development Programme office in Gaza, said some UN agency rescuers were at the site.

The death figures will change as more bodies are recovered. That is why the public numbers diverged on the same day. What does not change is the cause described by every local agency on the ground: a building already weakened by earlier strikes, used as shelter because the alternatives were tents or the street, then failing while people slept.

Dahshan told residents to stay away from damaged blocks. For households that already live in them, that warning has no second address attached to it. The missing count of about 100 is the number that will decide whether 16 September is remembered as a collapse that killed a score of people or as one that killed many more.