Gaza Families Face Deadly Choice: Stay in Collapsing Buildings or Face Homelessness
Gaza City, Gaza Strip — The roof above Masada Abu Jarad’s apartment is a jagged mess of broken concrete and twisted rebar. Her family lives under a tent, pitched right inside their partially collapsed home in Gaza City’s Palestine Square. It’s a desperate scene.
The 60-year-old knows the danger. Red Crescent and Civil Defence officials warned them to leave last week. But with Israel blocking proper reconstruction after three years of war, options are scarce. “We have no options,” Masada states, grimly. “I want to leave, but who will give me an alternative?”
She’s been in this building for a year, returning north after displacement. This isn’t her true home; her family fled Beit Lahiya early in the war, an area Israel decimated. They can’t go back. Repeated moves have worn them down. And even if a safer spot appeared, affording it is another hurdle. “Even if there is a better place, tell me how I can afford to rent it,” she asks.
Masada’s plight isn’t unique. It mirrors a wider housing crisis in Gaza. The war has killed over 73,000 Palestinians, leaving countless survivors without safe homes.
A City on the Brink
A joint assessment by the UN, World Bank, and EU painted a stark picture: 371,888 housing units – 76.6 percent of all housing – were destroyed or damaged as of October 2025. Rebuilding Gaza, they estimate, will cost over $71 billion in the next decade.
The danger isn’t theoretical. On September 16, a six-story war-damaged residential building in Gaza City crumbled, killing 21 people, including 12 children. That collapse serves as a terrifying warning.
Abdullah Abu Hajar, 40, lives with his wife and five children in the severely damaged al-Najma building in Remal. Seventeen families, about 50 to 60 people, call this unstable, six-story structure home. Municipal notices plastered outside scream warnings: unsafe, at risk of collapse.
At night, Abdullah can’t sleep. He listens. Every creak, every shift of concrete, every stone moving sends a jolt of fear through him. “I stay awake all night, keeping watch,” he explains. “I can’t close my eyes. I keep just listening to sounds around me.” His kids have adapted, he says, but he hasn’t. The September 16 collapse intensified his fear; he’s barely slept since. “I’m already on edge,” he admits. “But I don’t know where I can go.”
Abdullah’s family, too, fled Beit Hanoon, moving repeatedly before settling in al-Najma. His relatives face similar uncertainty. One is moving between north and south, just looking for a place to pitch a tent. Abdullah invited him to stay, but the relative hesitates, wary of the building’s condition. Yet, “he has nowhere else to go,” Abdullah adds.
Islam Hassanein, 36, shares these fears. A mother of five, she’s spent almost a year in a single, damaged room on the third floor of a leaning building. She found it filled with rubble. “We cleaned it and stayed in it,” she says simply. The plumbing doesn’t work. It’s hardly a home. But leaving? Impossible. “We keep looking, but we can’t find anywhere,” she laments. “They might even force us out of here. What are we supposed to do?”
She’d leave instantly for a safe spot. “If they find us a good place and provide us with a tent, we will leave from the morning,” she promises. “But where is this place? And where is the tent?” The building constantly reminds her of the threat. “Every day, you hear the cracking,” she says. “Then a column fell, and they took us out of the building temporarily.”
Winter brings new terrors. Colder, wetter weather means more pressure on weakened structures, water seeping through exposed roofs. “Last winter was terrifying,” Islam recalls. “We were constantly afraid that the building would collapse.” She often stayed in her family’s tent because her building flooded. “Now, I am very afraid of this winter, and I don’t know what we are going to do.”
The UN estimates thousands are sheltering in unsafe, damaged buildings; better housing just isn’t available. Israeli restrictions on tents, tarpaulins, and other basic shelter materials worsen the crisis. UNICEF reports nearly 84 percent of Gaza’s population—over 1.76 million people—live in overcrowded displacement sites or inadequate, damaged shelters, with little protection from the elements. Islam worries for her five children. “They are all afraid,” she says. But with no alternatives, she feels helpless. “We leave it to God.”