War-damaged Gaza City building collapses, killing at least 20

A residential building in Gaza City that had already been struck in the war collapsed overnight into Wednesday, 16 September. Gaza’s Civil Defence, the rescue service that works under Hamas authority, said at least 20 people were killed. Later tallies from the same service and from medical sources put the dead between 20 and 21, with children among them. About 14 to 25 people were taken to hospital. Crews said they could still hear voices under the slab.

The numbers moved through the day because the building came down on people who were asleep, and because the site had no heavy gear. Raed al-Dahshan, director of the Gaza City civil defence service, said at least ten families had been living in the block. Mahmoud Basal, a civil defence spokesman, told Al Jazeera that nearly 100 people were still under the wreckage by mid-morning. Zaher al-Wahidi of the Gaza Health Ministry said the dead included at least 13 women and children. Times of Israel, citing Civil Defence later in the afternoon, reported 20 dead, including eight children, and 20 people pulled out alive.

The structure itself is not in dispute. Civil Defence described a six- or seven-storey block with four apartments on each floor. It had been hit by an Israeli strike earlier in the war. The walls and floors were already cracked. Families moved in anyway because the alternative was a tent. Witnesses said the fall also came down on tents pitched against the building. Alessandro Mrakic, who heads the UN Development Programme office in Gaza, said some UN agency staff joined the search and that the work was slow because there was almost no machinery.

That last point is the operational fact. Rescuers dug with hands, shovels and car jacks. Video circulated on Wednesday of a girl being lifted out and of Basal carrying a small child wrapped in a stained scarf. Those images do not change the inventory. Gaza’s civil defence has said for months that about 2,000 damaged buildings across the strip still have families in them. Al-Dahshan repeated the warning on Wednesday: stay out of struck blocks. He also said people had no other roof.

Israel has said it will not permit reconstruction while Hamas remains armed. A ceasefire track between Israel and Hamas has not produced a deal that would let cement and steel move in at volume. The result is a housing stock that is both occupied and unsound. Reuters put the number of damaged buildings used as shelter in the same range Civil Defence uses: about 2,000. Most of Gaza’s roughly two million people now live on less than half the territory. Crowding into a cracked stairwell is a calculation, not a misunderstanding of risk.

The collapse is not an airstrike of 16 September. It is the delayed failure of an earlier strike. That distinction matters for how the event is recorded, and it does not change the outcome for the people who were inside. Buildings that take a blast and stay standing often lose the ties between slabs and columns. Concrete that looks intact can shear months later, especially after rain, after a nearby blast, or after another family hangs washing on a fractured balcony. Civil Defence said the block “collapsed entirely” on sleepers.

Search work was still going after dark. Al-Dahshan said there was still a chance of finding people alive. UNDP staff on the site described the same shortage every Gaza rescue now faces: no crane, no acoustic locator worth the name, no spare hours of fuel for the few pumps that exist. The Health Ministry’s running count of war dead does not yet fold this building into a separate line. For the families at the pile, the only number that matters is who comes out.

The wider frame is the same as last week and the week before. Tens of thousands of people are living in structures that engineers would close. The 16 September collapse is one of those structures reaching the end of its remaining life. Civil Defence has now told residents, again, to leave damaged blocks. The shelter map does not give them somewhere else to go.